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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/somefamouscountrOOtipp 




HUR5LEY CHURCHYARD 



SOME 

FAMOUS COUNTRY 

PARISHES 



BY 

EZRA S. TIPPLE 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK: EATON&MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



£3 



Copyright, 1911, by 
EATON & MAINS 






©CI A 3 (1 



to HER 

WHOSE BRIGHTNESS SHORTENS EVERY JOURNEY, 

WHOSE ENTHUSIASM GLORIFIES EVERY SCENE, 

WHOSE COMRADESHIP MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD BEAUTIFUL, 

THE LADY OF MY PILGRIMAGE, 
E. W. T. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



hursley ........ i 

Bemerton ....... 40 

Madeley ........ 80 

Kidderminster ...... 120 

somersby ........ 164 

eversley ....... 200 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Hursley Churchyard Frontispiece l 



FACING PAGE 



Salisbury Cathedral 4 

Winchester Cathedral 4 

On the Romsey Road 8 

Romsey Abbey 8 

Tintern Abbey 12 

Beaulieu Abbey 12 

Minstead Church 16 

A Glade in the New Forest 16 

Hursley Village Street 20 

New Forest : Wild Horses 20 

Hursley Church from the Road 24 

Hursley Vicarage and Church 24 

Hursley Church Porch 28 

Interior Hursley Church 28v 

Oxford : Oriel College 32 

Oxford : Exeter Gardens 2> 2 

Fountain at Ampfield 36 

Ampfield Church 30V 

Interior Chapel Keble College, Oxford 38 

Graves of John Keble and His Wife 38 

Wilton Hall 46 

Bemerton Church : West Front 46 v 

The New Bemerton Church 52V 

Bishop's Palace, Salisbury 52 

Bemerton Rectory 58 

Bemerton Church 58 v 

vii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING PAGE 



Saint John's College, Cambridge 64T 

Interior Old Bemerton Church 64/ 

George Herbert's Garden 70 

"A Silver Stream Shall Roll His Waters Near". . . . 70 \/ 

Bemerton Garden : Summer House 74 / 

The Country Parson in His Garden 74 

The Private River of the Bemerton Garden 78 ^ 

Salisbury Cathedral Across the Meadows 78 

Lake Leman and the Castle of Chillon 84. v 

A Shropshire Cottage 84V 

Coalbrookdale 90 / 

Old Court House, Madeley 90 v 

Fletcher's Pulpit and Bible 98 » 

Madeley Church 98 [ 

Manuscript Sermon of Fletcher's 106 v 

Chancel Fletcher's Church 112 \l 

Appian Way 112 

Addison's Walk, Oxford 120 \i~ 

Tower of Magdalen College, Oxford 120 

On the Severn 124 / 

Worcester Cathedral 124 

Baxter's Church 134 

A Kidderminster Street 134 ; 

Oldest Door in Kidderminster 142 / 

Interior Baxter's Church 142 , 

Baxter's Statue, Kidderminster 150 

Trimpley Green 150 

Arley Village 158 

Saint Peter's Church, Arley 158 

Lincoln Cathedral, Central Tower 166 

Lincoln Cathedral, Choir, Looking East 172 f 

viii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING PAGE 



Somersby Rectory 172 / 

Room in which Tennyson was Born 176^ 

Road Passing Somersby Rectory iy& 

Somersby Church 180 V 

Bag-Enderby Church 180 ^ 

Entrance Court King's College, Cambridge 186 '" 

Towers of the Chapel of King's College 186^ 

Clevedon Church 190 ]/ 

Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey 190 

Stockworth Mill 194/ 

Farringf ord 194 

Saint John's College, Cambridge 198 

The Cam, Cambridge 198 

Clovelly : The Main Street 204 

The Sea at Clovelly 204 

Magdalen College, Cambridge 208- 

Kingsley's Country Parish 208^ 

Eversley Church 216/ 

Interior Eversley Church 216 

Chester Cathedral 226 

Westminster Abbey 226/ 

Eversley Rectory 234^ 

Eversley Churchyard 234 V 

Charles Kingsley's Grave 242 '/ 



IX 



INTRODUCTION 

There is new interest everywhere in the 
country parish and the country church. In 
recent years the modern city, with its amazing 
growth, its appalling religious destitution, its 
multitudinous needs, and its dire menace, has 
largely engaged the attention of Christian 
workers. Now, however, with almost startling 
suddenness, Christian people are awakening to 
the fact that there are problems of the country 
also quite as immediate, as threatening, and as 
imperious. There are problems of a declining 
population, of lack of workers, of poor financial 
methods and inadequate resources, of the main- 
tenance of too many churches in dwindling 
communities, of buildings unfitted for modern 
forms of church work, of scandalously underpaid 
ministers, and many other problems which have 
sprung out of the changed conditions of country 
life and the readjustment of the times. This 
book, however, is not a study of present-day 
country parishes nor an attempt to solve 
the many and varied problems of rural 
churches. In it may be found, though, here 
and there, a hint, perhaps, that now, as in 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

former days, the mastering of perplexing situ- 
ations and the successful cultivation of 
meager and barren fields, even unto much 
fruitfulness, is a matter of personality, and 
that in America, as in England, the oppor- 
tunity of the country church and the country 
pastor, in part at least, is the opportunity of 
cultivating reverence, of encouraging simplicity 
of worship, of developing a deep and restful 
type of piety, of keeping alive in the hearts 
of men a sense of the sublimity and beauty 
of God's world, and of sending forth from 
country parsonages and country homes, as in 
other days, sons and daughters of sturdy faith 
and royal purpose to "where cross the crowded 
ways of life," there to dominate, to inspire, 
and to bless. 

The illustrations in the book, it scarcely 
need be said, I presume, are of the churches 
and parishes as they now appear and not 
as in the days of which I write. 

The reproduction of the manuscript sermon 
of John Fletcher is through the courtesy of 
my friend, the Rev. S. Parkes Cadman, D.D., 
Pastor of the Central Congregational Church, 
Brooklyn, New York. p „ ^ 

Drew Theological Seminary, 
Madison, New Jersey, October 2, 191 1. 

xii 



SOME 

FAMOUS COUNTRY 

PARISHES 



HURSLEY 

It was Saint Swithin's Day, and Saint 
Swithin is the patron saint of Winchester. It 
had dawned clear, to the inexpressible joy of 
all England, for that fair island, "set in silver," 
had had only rain and cold all the spring and 
summer. The weather had been the one theme 
of conversation, and whatever was said was in 
the form of expletives and invectives. And 
now Saint Swithin's Day is at hand, what if it 
should rain this day? 

"Saint Swithin's Day, gif ye do rain, for forty days it will 
remain ; 
Saint Swithin's Day, an ye be fair, for forty days 'twill 
rain nae mair." 

"Let's go to Winchester," said the Lady, as 
she looked out of the window of a London 
hotel. "I do believe it is going to be a pleasant 
day!" 

"Agreed, provided you will go with me to 
Hursley," and the bargain was made, and we 
set out. What a day it was! Rural England 
never seemed lovelier, as we rode the sixty and 
more miles to the cathedral city of Hampshire, 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

some twelve miles northeast of Southampton, 
beautifully situated in a rich valley, which is 
watered by the famed Itchin River, along 
whose banks in the later years of his life 
sauntered Izaak Walton, the high priest among 
English men of letters of the religion of 
recreation. 

The historical interest of Winchester and of 
its cathedral can scarcely be exaggerated. It 
is a city of great antiquity, having had an 
existence before the Roman invasion even. 
The Saxons took possession of it in 495. It 
was the capital of the Saxon kingdom of Wes- 
sex, and was converted to Christianity by 
Birinus, the apostle of the west of England, in 
635, and later was the seat of government of 
Alfred the Great, Canute the Dane, and Wil- 
liam the Conqueror. Here in this royal city 
was crowned Egbert in 827, as was also Edward 
the Confessor in 1042. And here, it is said, 
Emma, the mother of the latter, "underwent 
without hurt the terrible ordeal of walking, 
blindfold and barefoot, over nine red-hot plow- 
shares, placed at unequal distances." Henry 
III was born here and frequently held his 
court here; Henry IV was married here; and 
here Henry VIII, of more or less questionable 
memory, entertained Charles V for a week in 

2 



HURSLEY 

1522. After the Norman Conquest Winchester 
rivaled London even in commercial importance, 
but soon lost its preeminence. 

It has had, however, large importance always 
as a cathedral city. The see of Winchester is 
of very great antiquity, and the cathedral of 
great beauty and dignity. It stands in an open 
space near the center of the stately city, keep- 
ing solemn guard over it. That it is full of 
interest goes without saying — all English cathe- 
drals are. It may not have the romantic charm 
of Canterbury, or the exquisite grace of Salis- 
bury, but, as the Lady, who was seeing it for 
the first time, said, as she stood looking down 
the nave created by the architectural genius of 
Wykeham, "It is beautiful, isn't it?" Just at 
this moment one of the vergers, who was con- 
ducting a party of English schoolboys, came 
near, and we heard him recite his more than 
twicetold tale: "This cathedral, young gentle- 
men, is the longest in England, five hundred 
and sixty feet, and, indeed, in all Europe, 
except Saint Peter's, Rome; it was built in 
1709, and incorporates every style of English 
architecture from the Norman to the Perpen- 
dicular; it contains memorials of Bishop Wilber- 
force and Izaak Walton, and in six richly colored 
wooden mortuary chests are preserved the bones 

3 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

of Ethelwplf, Egbert, Canute, William Rufus, 
and other kings." 

"Come," said the Lady, "that sounds too 
much like Baedeker," and we turned away to 
stand once more by the grave of Jane Austen, 
which is almost opposite the tomb of the 
founder of the cathedral, William of Wykeham. 
A large black slab of marble marks the spot, 
and elsewhere are other memorials, a brass 
tablet on the wall not far from her resting 
place, and a beautiful window, inserted in 1900 
by public subscription. The quaint house in 
which she spent her last days is still standing 
in College Street, not far away, and attracts 
almost as many pilgrims to Winchester as the 
cathedral. "It looks just like her," said the 
Lady — who has always been enthusiastic over 
the novels of Jane Austen — as she stood gazing 
at the bow window overlooking the narrow 
street, and into the drawing room, where slowly 
ebbed away the life of the gentle woman, whose 
gifts Sir Walter Scott — after he had read for 
the second time her "Pride and Prejudice" — 
praised with such admirable fervor, and who 
added so appreciably by her work to the lit- 
erary fame of Winchester, not inconsiderable, 
by any means, before her time, for it must not 
be forgotten that Winchester does lay early 

4 




SALISBURY CATHEDRAL 




WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL 



HURSLEY 

claim to great literary distinction; no less than 
this, in fact, that "Alfred created English 
literature," and that he created it right here 
in this cathedral city. It may well be, as Dean 
Kitchin says it is, "a source of legitimate pride 
for Winchester that within her walls Alfred 
made that first and greatest history book of 
the English people." 

If here at Winchester a good king made a 
"history book," not far away, in an almost 
obscure village, a good man, who lived many 
years after Alfred, made history. Five miles 
to the southwest, and nearer the sea, is the 
village of Hursley, for thirty years the country 
parish of John Keble, the author of "The Chris- 
tian Year," and one of the saintliest of men. It 
is situated on the turnpike road leading from 
Winchester to Romsey, and at about equal 
distance from each. The whole region for many 
square miles "is justly regarded as one of the 
most favored in England. The varied char- 
acter of its scenery, with its noble chalk downs, 
its extensive seaboard, its verdant and peaceful 
valleys, its vast stretches of moor and forest 
land, cannot fail to charm the lover of nature." 
The soil seems specially adapted for the growth 
of trees, and everywhere are trees, and such 
trees ! In the early days the entire district was 

5 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

probably either forest ground or downs, and 
when the king rode out from Winchester he 
"was able to ride over down, heather, and 
wood, scarcely meeting an in closure the whole 
way from Winchester." 

Not far distant is the New Forest, "with the 
possible exception of the river Thames, Eng- 
land's most beautiful national possession, and 
the most prized." This wonderful forest is 
not "new." It must have been more than 
sixty years ago that Captain Marryat wrote 
"The Children of the New Forest, " and the forest 
was then nearly eight centuries old, having 
been seized in 1079 — the year Winchester Cathe- 
dral was begun — by that royal oppressor, Wil- 
liam the Conqueror, who loved the chase and 
was without conscience, and who made it a game 
preserve, where he might hunt and kill to his 
heart's delight. In those days this forest was 
"the best hated thing in Europe," being re- 
garded as "a monument of Norman oppression 
and English slavery." The name of the king 
was covered with odium, and disasters came 
upon members of his family which were regarded 
as judgments of Jehovah upon his wickedness, 
and when he died it was written of him: 

"See the man who spacious regions gave, 
And wastes of beasts — himself denied a grave." 

6 



HURSLEY 

But that was long ago. The forest is no longer 
a "hated thing." Its woods and heaths — some 
ninety thousand acres — are beautiful beyond 
words, always beautiful, whether in April, 
when the thorn is in the leaf and the primrose 
in flower; or in July, when in the gardens the 
roses riot on walls and trellises, and the slopes 
of the hills are covered with yellow gorse or 
are beginning to purple with heather; or in 
October, when the vast stretches of landscape 
glow with myriad tints of color more wonderful 
than the walls of old-world picture galleries. 

Within this vast forest are numerous 
churches, which were undoubtedly the centers 
of the earliest settlements in this world of 
trees, such as Minstead Church, once noted 
because of the number of gypsy children bap- 
tized in it ; Boldre Church, the rector of which for 
thirty years was the celebrated William Gilpin, 
the author of the "Life of Bernard Gilpin, the 
Apostle of the North," and "Forest Scenery," a 
book worthy to rank with White's "Selborne"; 
and the Beaulieu Parish Church, which stands 
amid the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, grand and 
imposing even in their decay, as is also Tintern 
Abbey, which is not far away and with which 
Wordsworth was so enraptured. Then there 
is Romsey Abbey, outside the New Forest, 

7 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

but on the way to Hursley — or are we approach- 
ing Keble's parish from Winchester? But 
that was another time. This time we are 
coming by way of Romsey, and it is another 
rarely beautiful July day, even more beautiful 
than Saint Swithin's Day of the previous year, 
and, almost before we realize it, we are in the 
little village of Hursley. 

It really isn't much of a village — just a short 
street with houses on either side like many of 
the small hamlets in England. When Keble 
settled here, in 1836, he came to a widely scat- 
tered parish and to a church which, like Win- 
chester, had a history dating back to about the 
same period. But the early history of this old 
church need not concern us now. It is the 
Hursley parish of a later day in which we are 
interested at this moment, the new era of 
which really began with the accession of Sir 
William Heathcote, who came into possession 
of Hursley Hall on the death of his uncle, in 
1825, and with the coming of John Keble as 
curate of Hursley Church the following year. 

John Keble was born April 25, 1792, at Fair- 
ford, in Gloucestershire. His father was a 
country clergyman, who taught his son so 
efficiently that before the boy was fifteen he 
had gained a scholarship at Corpus Christi, 




ON THE ROMSEY ROAD 



jynfci 




ROMSEY ABBEY 



HURSLEY 

Oxford, and four years later became a Fellow 
of Oriel College. While in Oxford he formed 
a choice circle of friends, among them John 
Taylor Coleridge, a nephew of Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge, who was ever his loyal friend and 
wise adviser, and his chief biographer; John 
Tucker, the missionary, and Thomas Arnold, 
"who differed from Keble in almost every 
point, and yet wound himself very closely 
around his heart." Brilliant indeed was that 
Oxford career! He won many prizes, and was 
regarded by professors and churchmen as "the 
first man in Oxford." But neither his successes 
nor the adulation of his friends poisoned the 
fountain of his heart, and he remained simple, 
unaffected, and genuinely humble always. The 
spirit with which he entered upon his ministry 
is beautifully evident in the request which he 
made of his friend Coleridge as the time drew 
near for his ordination: "Pray for me; pray 
earnestly, my dear, my best friend, that He 
would give me his grace, that I may not be 
altogether unworthy of the sacred office on 
which I am, rashly I fear, even now entering; 
but that some souls hereafter may have cause 
to bless me. Pray that - 1 may be free from 
vanity, from envy, from discontent, from im- 
pure imaginations; that I may not grow weary, 

9 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

nor wander in heart from God's service; that I 
may not be judging others uncharitably, nor 
vainly dreaming how they will judge me, at the 
very moment that I seem most religiously and 
most charitably employed. Without any fool- 
ish affectation of modesty I can truly say that 
the nearer the time approaches, the more 
strongly I feel my own unfitness and unworthi- 
ness for the ministry; yet as I hope it is not 
such, but that it may be removed in time by 
earnest and constant use of the means of grace, 
I do not think it needful to defer my ordina- 
tion, but I want all the help I can get in the 
awful and difficult preparation; do not, there- 
fore, forget me in your prayers." Whoever 
goes to his God-given task with such humility 
of heart, and with such a high and solemn re- 
gard for his calling in Christ Jesus, will not 
draw back from any field, town or country. 

Keble's first parish was Southrop, in which 
were two other small villages. Here he re- 
mained three years, happy in his work. It was 
while here that he wrote a friend: "I get fonder 
and fonder of the country and of poetry and of 
such things every year of my life." Happy the 
man who, like Froebel, loves birds and flowers 
and trees and children and God! In this first 
parish Keble's salary was but five hundred dollars 

10 



HURSLEY 

a year, but he had other priceless compensations, 
in the "tranquil fields and winding roads," in 
the responsiveness of the people to his gracious 
ministries of comfort and instruction, and in 
their gratitude, often crudely expressed, but 
always sincere, and in the affection and devo- 
tion of several young men, who had followed 
him when he left Oriel College to be with him 
as pupils in his new parish. What Keble did 
for this brilliant group of eager students, Rob- 
ert Wilberforce, Isaac Williams, and Hurrell 
Froude, cannot be estimated. "The moral and 
spiritual influence which he wielded over them 
was enormous." It was his life, quite as much 
as what he said, which molded the characters 
and created the ideals of his pupils. Dean 
Church, the historian of the Oxford Movement, 
shows in his account of Isaac Williams how 
strong this influence was. "He had before him 
in John Keble a spectacle which was abso- 
lutely new to him. Ambitious as a rising and 
successful scholar at college, he saw a man 
looked up to and wondered at by everyone, 
absolutely without pride and ambition. He 
saw the most distinguished academic of his 
day, to whom every prospect was open, retiring 
from Oxford in the height of his fame to busy 
himself with a few hundreds of Gloucestershire 

ii 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

peasants in a miserable curacy. He saw this 
man caring for and respecting the ignorant and 
poor as much as others respected the great and 
learned. He saw this man, who had made what 
the world would call so great a sacrifice, ap- 
parently unconscious that he had made any 
sacrifice at all, gay, unceremonious, bright, full 
of play as a boy, ready with his pupils for any 
exercise, mental or muscular — for a hard ride, 
or a crabbed bit of iEschylus, or a logic fence 
with disputatious and paradoxical undergrad- 
uates, giving and taking on even ground. 
These pupils saw one, the breadth of whose 
religion none could doubt, 'always endeavoring 
to do them good, as it were, unknown to them- 
selves and in secret, and ever avoiding that his 
kindness should be felt and acknowledged'; 
showing in the whole course of daily life the 
purity of Christian love, and taking the utmost 
pains to make no profession or show of it." 
Nor was that which they did for him incon- 
siderable either. The law of spiritual return 
holds everywhere. Keble received as well as 
gave. There are other fruits of a Christian 
minister's toil besides money. 

Keble had been at Hursley as curate but a 
few months when the death of his sister changed 
his plans, and he returned to Fairford to care 

12 




TINTERN ABBEY 




BEAULIEU ABBEY 



HURSLEY 

for his father, where he remained as his as- 
sistant until his father's death, after which, 
Hursley being again offered to him, he entered 
upon his lifelong work there in 1836. Keble 
was always a country minister. Was he con- 
tent? He certainly knew little from experience 
of any other kind of a parish. When he went 
to Oxford it was from a country parish; when 
he left Oxford it was to minister in a country 
parish. One of his biographers thinks that one 
of his poems, written in 1825, holds "a confes- 
sion of the stirrings of ambition" — 

"My willful heart would burst away 
From where the holy shadow lay, 
Where heaven my lot had cast" — 

but when once the choice was made his de- 
votion was fixed and entire. Preferment was 
never offered him, except early in his career, 
when the archdeaconry of Barbados was ten- 
dered him and was declined, but this in no 
wise troubled him. "To fulfill his own idea of 
work upon his flock at Hursley was sincerely 
all he desired, and he never felt as if he had 
come up to his own standard." 

In a way he was already famous when he 
came to Hursley. Three' years previous he had 
preached at Oxford the Assize sermon on 
"National Apostasy," which John Henry New- 

13 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

man, in his ' 'Apologia, "says he always considered 
the beginning of the famous Oxford Movement 
of 1833. Moreover, as early as 1819 he had 
begun to write the poems which were to make 
up "The Christian Year," and with which his 
name will be forever associated, and shortly 
thereafter he had determined to make this col- 
lection which would illustrate the Church Year 
with its various Sundays and Holy Days. 
"The Christian Year" was published in 1827, and 
was an immediate success. Newman wrote: 
"Keble's hymns seem quite exquisite." Arnold 
thought that nothing equal to them existed in 
the language. Hurrell Froude was more criti- 
cal, and expressed his fear that people might 
take the author for a Methodist! The volume 
had an enormous sale. In twenty years, more 
than forty editions were called for, and through- 
out his life the sale of the book continued 
unabated. The influence of the book in Keble's 
day or since, how can it be computed? So far 
as the Oxford Movement is concerned, it was 
the book of the century. Isaac Williams said, 
"Thy book I love because thyself art there." 
Twenty-four years after Keble's death an old 
parishioner said, "Father and I do read 'The 
Christian Year' every Sunday, and it do bring 
him out to us more than we knew even when 

14 



HURSLEY 

he was alive." Keble's mission, as disclosed in 
this book, was "to illustrate the soothing 
tendency of the Prayer-book," and to make 
more glorious the Church of England. "As 
chivalry was to Sir Walter Scott, so was the 
Church of England to Mr. Keble, or rather far 
more, for she was his mother, a real life and 
being, to whom he gave his loyal allegiance 
under, of course, her Head, and all the more 
because 'round her towers he walked in jealous 
fear,' and looked on her as a decaying church, 
little knowing that he was really sounding the 
first prelude to the notes that were to awaken 
her children to energy and devotion." 

Some of the poems of this collection which 
are best loved are that beautiful evening hymn : 

"Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear, 
It is not night if thou be near," 

which is usually sung to the tune so fittingly 
called "Hursley"; "Blest are the pure in heart," 
"There is a Book," and the poem for the 
Fourth Sunday in Lent, a few stanzas of which 
I must give: 

"When Nature tries her finest touch, 
Weaving her vernal wreath, 
Mark ye, how close she veils her round, 
Not to be trac'd by sight or sound, 
Nor soil'd by ruder breath? 

15 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

"Who ever saw the earliest rose 

First open her sweet breast? 
Or, when the summer sun goes down, 
The first soft star in evening's crown 

Light up her gleaming crest? 

' ' Fondly we seek the dawning bloom 
On features wan and fair, — 
The gazing eye no change can trace, 
But look away a little space, 
Then turn, and, lo! 'tis there. 

"But there's a sweeter flower than e'er 

Blush' d on the rosy spray — 
A brighter star, a richer bloom 
Than e'er did western heaven illume 

At close of summer day. 

" 'Tis Love, the last best gift of Heaven; 
Love, gentle, holy, pure; 
But tenderer than a dove's soft eye, 
The searching sun, the open sky, 
She never could endure." 

But there are many others quite as helpfully 
devotional. "The Christian Year" is not read 
perhaps as widely as while Keble lived or in 
the period immediately following his death, 
when in nine months seven editions were 
printed and more than eleven thousand copies 
sold, but it still has "power to soothe," which 
was and is its greatest charm. "If poems can 
be found to enliven in dejection, and to com- 
fort in anxiety, to cool the over-sanguine, to 

16 




MINSTEAD CHURCH 




A GLADE IN THE NEW FOREST 



HURSLEY 

refresh the weary, and to awe the worldly, to 
instill resignation into the impatient, and calm- 
ness into the impatient and agitated — they are 
these." And Keble had written these before 
he came to Hursley. 

This parish of Hursley was, it seems, very 
intimately connected with an important period 
of English history, a fact which interested 
Keble, and which attracts the immediate at- 
tention of all pilgrims to the parish church. 
"Have you seen the monument of Richard 
Cromwell?" the vicar asked us, after he had 
shown us the tablet to the memory of John 
Keble, adding, "That is quite the most im- 
portant thing here." I recalled that I had 
seen in the list of rectors and vicars of Hursley 
Church, which Charlotte M. Yonge, the well- 
known authoress of a generation ago, who 
wrote "The Heir of Redclyffe," and numerous 
other books for young and old, gives in her 
account of "John Keble's Parishes" a break 
in the names between the years 1645 and 1660, 
which this ardent Church of England partisan 
bridges with the almost contemptuous explana- 
tion in brackets, "Several Puritan Intruders," 
but I had forgotten for the moment the more 
important connection which English Puritan- 
ism had with this parish. 

17 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Richard Cromwell was Oliver Cromwell's 
eldest surviving son at the time when that 
mighty captain had defeated the king's armies 
and brought about the execution of the king. 
Some three weeks after the king's execution 
the Protector wrote, under date of February 
12, 1648, to Richard Maijor, Esq., a sturdy 
Protestant living at Merdon, in Hursley parish, 
reopening negotiations which had been begun 
the year previous looking to a marriage be- 
tween his son Richard and Mr. Maijor's elder 
daughter Dorothy. The letter was direct and 
plain: 

"Sir — I received some intimations formerly, 
and by the last return from Southampton a 
Letter from Mr. Robinson, concerning the re- 
viving of the last year's notion, touching upon 
my Son and your Daughter. Mr. Robinson 
was also pleased to send enclosed in his a Letter 
from you, bearing the date the 5th of this 
instant, February, wherein I find your willing- 
ness to entertain any good means for the com- 
pleating of that business. From whence I take 
encouragement to send my Son to wait upon 
you; and by him to let you know that my 
desires are, if Providence so dispose, very full 
and free to the thing, — if upon an interview, 
there prove also a freedom in the young per- 



HURSLEY 

sons thereunto. What liberty you will give 
herein, I wholly submit to you. I thought fit, 
in my letter to Mr. Robinson, to mention some- 
what of expedition; because I know not how 
soon I may be called into the field, or other 
occasions may remove me from hence; having 
for the present some liberty of stay in London. 
The Lord direct all to his glory. I rest, Sir, 
your very humble servant, 

"Oliver Cromwell." 
This letter, which was well received, was al- 
most immediately followed by the young 
Richard himself, twenty-one years of age, of 
comely appearance and easy manner, who, ac- 
companied by a friend of his father, visited 
Hursley, and was received by the family "with 
many civilities." On his return home the ac- 
counts which he gave must have been en- 
couragingly satisfactory, for the soldier-father 
dispatched a note of thanks to Mr. Maijor for 
"the reception of my son, in the liberty given 
him to wait on your worthy daughter, the re- 
port of whose virtues and godliness has so 
great place in my heart that I think fit not 
to neglect anything on my part which may 
consummate a close of -the business if God 
please to dispose the young ones' hearts there- 
unto, and other suitable ordering of affairs 

19 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

toward mutual satisfaction appear in the dis- 
pensation of providence." Much correspond- 
ence followed concerning "settlements," with 
considerable haggling, it is said, but at last all 
matters having been satisfactorily arranged, the 
marriage took place at Hursley on May Day, 
1649, a short time before Cromwell set out "to 
crush the ill-arranged risings in Ireland." The 
young people lived with the bride's father in 
the lodge at Hursley, where Mrs. Cromwell 
visited them, and where they continued to 
reside until the death of the Protector, in 
September, 1658, when Richard was accepted 
by Parliament and the army as his father's 
successor. He was quite a different type of 
man, however, and gave much offense by his 
manner of speech and behavior. Without 
genius for kindling enthusiasm, without taste 
or special qualification for war or statecraft, 
this "phantom king of half a year" must have 
felt immeasurable relief when the "Rump" 
Parliament requested him to resign, and he 
was privileged to return to Hursley, "where he 
found himself pursued by those debts of his 
father which the Long Parliament had engaged 
to pay, and which swallowed up more than his 
patrimony, though the manor of Merdon, hav- 
ing been settled upon his wife, could not be 

20 




HURSLEY VILLAGE STREET 




NEW FOREST : WILD HORSES 



HURSLEY 

touched. " After many vicissitudes, in part due 
to political causes, after many sorrows, some of 
them brought upon him by his own children, 
he died, in 17 12, in his eighty-sixth year, and 
was buried at Hursley. As Miss Yonge says, 
these words written by Palgrave are more 
graceful than the inscription on the monument 
erected to him by his two undutiful daughters, 
and they are indeed: 

"Him count we wise, 
Him also, though the chorus of the throng 

Be silent, though no pillar rise 
In slavish adulation of the strong, 
But here, from blame of tongues and fame aloof, 
'Neath a low chancel roof, 

"The peace of God 
He sleeps; unconscious hero! Lowly grave 
By village footsteps daily trod; 
Unconscious! or while silence holds the nave, 
And the bold robin comes, when day is dim, 
And pipes his heedless hymn." 

The beautiful lime trees which surround the 
churchyard, and, faithful guardians of their 
holy trust, keep ceaseless watch above the 
sleeping dead, are said to have been planted by 
Richard Cromwell, and are a worthier monu- 
ment to his memory than the large tablet of 
marble of Doric architecture, surmounted by 
death's heads, and bearing his name, which 

21 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

now fills a conspicuous place in the church 
directly opposite that of the Heathcote family. 
It has not always been so placed, for, like the 
one whom it commemorates, it was "exiled" 
for a time. The vicar told us that originally 
the monument had been in the chancel, a fitting 
place for it, it would seem, but that when the 
new church was built Sir William Heathcote, 
master of Hursley Park, "who hadn't any use 
for the Puritans," to use the words of the vicar, 
caused the monument to be removed and put 
in the sub-cellar, or some other equally obscure 
place in the rectory, where it remained out of 
sight of the worshipers and of the many 
strangers who visited the church, and of the 
great-hearted but opinionated baronet, until one 
day he fell seriously ill, and, his conscience 
pricking him concerning his treatment of the 
Cromwell monument, he gave hurried orders to 
have it restored to the church. 

There are many Cromwell traditions which 
are told to this day by the villagers, one 
of them being to the effect that Oliver hid 
his treasure in an iron chest, which was 
dropped to the bottom of Merdon Well. The 
story runs that when an attempt should be 
made to recover this chest it could be suc- 
cessful only provided silence was maintained 

22 



HURSLEY 

while it was being drawn up. Its recovery was 
one day essayed, when, as it neared the top of 
the well, an excited workman unthinkingly 
cried out, "Here it comes," and down to the 
lowest depths the priceless treasure sank, never 
to be seen again. 

"But we did not come to Hursley to do 
homage to the Cromwell family," said the 
Lady, as the vicar continued his recital of 
Cromwellian traditions; "it is the Hursley of 
Keble that we are most interested in, and as 
people always will be." (There are more than 
two thousand visitors to this little country 
church every year, and few of them know 
anything about it, except that John Keble 
ministered at its altar.) 

"Would you like to see the vicarage?" said 
the friendly vicar, taking the hint. Think of 
asking such a question of two people who had 
lived in a parsonage and knew its beautiful 
joys! The vicarage is not far from the church, 
just beyond the churchyard, and separated 
from it by a low wall. To this attractive house 
Keble, on accepting the living at Hursley, 
brought his young bride, and with her estab- 
lished an ideal home, which was always the 
center of the parish life, quite as much so, if 
not more, as the spacious Hursley Hall, the 

23 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

palatial house of his patron, Sir William Heath- 
cote. What a radiantly happy home this 
parsonage-house was for thirty years! Mrs. 
Keble was a beautiful woman, gifted, refined, 
gentle, winsome, and in fullest sympathy with 
her preacher-husband's ideals and methods of 
parish work. "My conscience, my memory, 
and my common sense," was Keble's descrip- 
tion of her. No children were born into the 
home, and so a whole world of affection was 
lavished on the boys and girls of the parish. 
The teaching in the parish school took on new 
life from their coming to Hursley, one who was 
associated with them testifies, and Keble was 
notoriously painstaking with his confirmation 
classes, giving instruction month after month, 
through long periods, and having the young 
people come often to the vicarage for direction 
and for counsel. How wondrously gentle he 
was with children ! One of his biographers says 
that it was "the passion for purity" in his own 
life which accounts for his exquisite tenderness 
toward children. It may have been, but the 
Lady thinks it was just love for them. 

How great his concern for children was, how 
complete his devotion to them through all the 
years of his Hursley ministry, is best shown in 
his "Lyra Innocent ium, Thoughts in Verse, on 

24 




HURSLEY CHURCH FROM THE ROAD 




HURSLEY VICARAGE AND CHURCH 



HURSLEY 

Christian Children, Their Ways and Their 
Privileges," which he wrote, arranged, and pub- 
lished in the early years at Hursley. It is a 
volume somewhat after the fashion of "The 
Christian Year," having a poem appropriate for 
each Sunday and Holy Day. Miss Yonge says 
that many of the poems are full of Hursley 
atmosphere or events connected with the life 
of the author. " 'Christmas Eve Vespers' was 
suggested by the schoolmaster's little daughter 
going into church before the decorations had 
been put up, and exclaiming, disappointed, 'No 
Christmas!' 'The Second Sunday in Lent' re- 
calls, in the line 'on the mimic rain on poplar 
leaves,' the sounds made by a trembling aspen, 
whose leaves quivered all through the summer 
evenings, growing close to the house of Mr. 
Keble's lifelong friend and biographer, Sir 
John Taylor Coleridge, at Ottery Saint Mary. 
An engraving of Raphael's last picture, 'The 
Transfiguration,' hung in the vicarage drawing- 
room. 

" 'The Fourth Sunday in Lent,' on the offer- 
ing of the lad with the five loaves, was sug- 
gested by the stained window on that subject 
given by the young Marquis of Lothian — a 
pupil for some years of Mr. Wilson at Ampfield 
— to the church at Jedburgh, built by his 

25 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

mother. The eldest son of Dr. Moberly, when 
a child staying at the vicarage, was uncon- 
sciously the cause of the poems 'Loneliness' 
and 'Repeating the Creed' for Easter Sunday 
and Low Sunday. Frightened by unwonted 
solitude at bedtime, he asked to hear 'some- 
thing true,' and was happy when Mrs. Keble 
produced the Bible. He was a boy of beautiful 
countenance, and his reverent, thoughtful look, 
as he repeated the Creed, delighted Mr. Keble. 
It was little expected then that he was doomed 
to a lifelong struggle with invalidism, though 
he was able to effect much as a thinker and a 
priest, before he, too, was taken to see in 
paradise 'the glorious dream around him burst.' 
"It was a baby sister of his who drew herself 
up in her nurse's arms with a pretty gesture, 
like a pheasant's neck in a sort of reproof, as 
she said 'Thank you' to her little self, when she 
had held out a flower to Mr. Keble, which for 
once in his life he did not notice; and his self- 
reproach produced the thought of thankful- 
ness. One of the gems of the 'Lyra,' 'Bereave- 
ment,' was the thought that came to the mind 
of the pastor as he buried the little sister, the 
only child except the elder girl, of the bailiff at 
Dr. Moberly 's farm. 'Fire' embodied his feeling 
about a burnt child at Ampfield — 

26 



HURSLEY 

'We miss thee from thy place at school 
And on thy homeward way, 
Where violets, by the shady pool, 
Peep out so shyly gay.' 

The lullaby with the view of the burnished 
cross upon the spire, and the girl singing the 
baby to sleep with the old psalm — 

' In Thee I put my steadfast trust. 
Defend me, Lord, for thou art just' — 

is another Ampfield scene, inspiring noble and 
gentle thoughts for Innocents' Day. 

" 'Lifting up to the Cross' was the product of 
a drawing brought home from Germany of a 
sight beheld by Miss Maria Trench, on a journey 
with Sir William and Lady Heathcote. She 
afterward became Mrs. Robert F. Wilson, and 
made her first wedded home at Ampfield; and 
there is another commemoration of that journey 
in the fountain under the bank in Ampfield 
churchyard, an imitation of one observed in 
Tyrol, and with the motto: 

"While cooling waters here you drink 
Rest not your thoughts below, 
Look to the sacred sign and think 
Whence living waters flow, 
Then fearlessly advance by night or day; 
The holy Cross stands guardian of your way." 

11 'More Stars' and 'Wakefulness' are remi- 
niscences of Charles Coleridge Pode, a little 

27 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

nephew of Mr. Yonge, and his ecstatic joy on 
the first night of being out of doors late enough 
to see the glory of the stars." 

If one would form a judgment of Keble as a 
poet he must read, not only Keble 's Oxford 
lectures on poetry and "The Christian Year," but 
he must also read and reread this book of verses 
for children, where are to be found some of his 
poems of greatest beauty and poetic fancy. 
Moreover, he must bring to a study of Keble 's 
poetry somewhat of the love for God's world 
and for children which the Hursley minister felt. 

Keble always loved the country, its freshness 
and openness, its power to renew and to inspire. 
He had a reverence for it as he had a reverence 
for truth, God being the Maker of one and the 
Source of the other. Dr. Liddon called him 
the wisest man he had ever known, and Miss 
Yonge said that she had never been to him to 
ask his advice without getting an answer dif- 
ferent from what she expected, and one which 
showed that he had looked the matter round 
on all sides. He was always eager for knowl- 
edge, and nature to him was one of life's most 
valued teachers. His writings disclose both his 
affection for nature and the use which he made 
of her hints and other teachings. The opening 
poem of "The Christian Year" is as follows: 

28 




HURSLEY CHURCH PORCH 




INTERIOR HURSLEY CHURCH 



HURSLEY 

" Hues of the rich unfolding morn, 
That, ere the glorious sun be born, 
By some soft touch invisible 
Around his path are taught to swell; — 

"Thou rustling breeze so fresh and gay, 
That dancest forth at opening day, 
And brushing by with joyous wing, 
Wakenest each little leaf to sing; — 

"Ye fragrant clouds of dewy steam, 
By which deep grove and tangled stream 
Pay, for soft rains in season given, 
Their tribute to the genial heaven." 

No man who was not sensitive to the manifold 
beauties of God's world, or who did not love 
tree and cloud and the radiant glory of the sky, 
could have written such words as these. His 
poems abound with metaphors and compari- 
sons suggested by the many pages "of nature's 
beauteous book." "The march of some ma- 
jestic cloud," "the desert road," "the sparkling 
rill," "the birds that cower with folded wing," 
"the distant landscape," "the horizon's silent 
line," "heaven's star-sprinkled floor," "the bit- 
ter pool," 

"See the soft green willow springing 
Where the waters gently pass, 
Every way her free -arms flinging, 
O'er the moist and reedy grass," 

"the lark mounting with glistening wing," "the 

2Q 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

billowy corn," "the first soft star in evening's 
crown," and a thousand other like expressions, 
may be taken from his "Christian Year" and 
other poems. Perhaps nowhere did he express 
more beautifully his own joy of living and his 
love of nature than in his poem for the first 
Sunday after Epiphany: 

"Lessons sweet of spring returning, 
Welcome to the thoughtful heart! 

May I call ye sense or learning, 

Instinct pure, or Heav'n-taught art? 

Be your title what it may, 

Sweet the lengthening April day, 

While with you the soul is free, 

Ranging wild o'er hill and lea. 

"Soft as Memnon's harp at morning, 

To the inward ear devout, 
Touch'd by light, with heavenly warning 

Your transporting chords ring out. 
Every leaf in ever} 7 nook, 
Every wave in every brook, 
Chanting with a solemn voice, 
Minds us of our better choice. 

"Needs no show of mountain hoary, 
Winding shore or deepening glen, 
Where the landscape in its glory 

Teaches truth to wandering men: 
Give true hearts but earth and sky, 
And some flowers to bloom and die, — 
Homely scenes and simple views 
Lowly thoughts may best infuse." 

3° 



HURSLEY 

Keble's parish work was incessant. He, of 
course, like every true shepherd, knew every 
member of the parish. He "was the personal 
minister to each individual of his flock." What- 
ever had to be done he did. He watched over 
homes, as one who must give account. He 
visited the sick and the aged. He made fre- 
quent journeys to the workhouse to cheer its 
inmates, he taught in the parish school, he 
catechised the children in the church, he held 
the hand of the dying, he comforted the sor- 
rowing, he warned the impenitent. He was 
fearless, speaking frankly to those in the parish 
whose conduct seemed unworthy, and often- 
times even stern and severe when he had to 
deal with cases of scandal. One who was then 
a child recalls the flashing eye and stern satis- 
faction of his voice as he read out that a cer- 
tain murderer, who had escaped, had been 
caught and would be hanged. He added to the 
number of churches in his parish. Two miles 
away was a small hamlet, which was increasing 
in population, and there, at Ampfield, he built 
a church. He found the church at Hursley in 
poor condition, and unadapted for worship ac- 
cording to his ideas, and, feeling that the poor 
rural community which he was serving could 
not meet the expense of rebuilding, he met the 

3i 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

cost himself, some thirty thousand dollars, pro- 
viding for this large expenditure from the re- 
ceipts from the sale of 'The Christian Year." 
The Hursley Church is John Keble's monument! 
The sign board at the first turn to the left 
after leaving Hursley reads: "To Otterbourne," 
a village some five miles distant, and this was 
a part of the Hursley Parish. Here lived one 
of Mr. Keble's most helpful families, the 
Yonges, devoted friends, and who cooperated 
with him in all the enterprises of the parish. 
The memory of the gifted daughter of this 
home, Charlotte M. Yonge, will ever be closely 
associated with the Hursley Parish. The new 
school for boys, built in connection with the 
Otterbourne Church, in 1837, was in part paid 
for with the proceeds from the sale of her first 
book, "The Chateau de Melville." From the in- 
come derived from her other books she gave 
liberally to the work of the parish, and, more- 
over, was lavish of her time and strength. Mr. 
Keble's constant efforts to beautify the serv- 
ices of the sanctuary, to enrich the forms 
and deepen the spirit of worship, to inspire 
larger reverence for the church and its sacra- 
ments, to encourage and foster the growth of 
piety, and to write the statutes and command- 
ments of the religion of Jesus Christ upon the 

3 2 




oxford: oriel college 




OXFORD: EXETER GARDENS 



HURSLEY 

hearts of the often indifferent people of the 
parish, — all had her fullest sympathy and co- 
operation. And to his helpful friendship she 
bears abundant and grateful testimony. She 
died in 1901, in the seventy-eighth year of her 
age, and her grave in the Otterbourne church- 
yard is just by the monument to the memory 
of her pastor and friend. 

When Newman was asked to describe Keble 
he replied, "How shall I profess to paint a man 
who will not sit for his portrait?" It is diffi- 
cult to portray a man so sensitive, so self- 
effacing, so beautifully spiritual as John Keble 
was. In appearance he was slender, about 
medium height, with sloping shoulders, which 
made him look short until he drew himself up. 
His head was "one of the most beautifully 
formed heads in the world" — the face not beau- 
tiful, except when lighted with a smile, a broad 
forehead, clear, brilliant, penetrating eyes of 
dark brown, with what Southey called "a 
pendulous motion," lighting up quickly with 
merriment, or kindling into fire in a moment 
of indignation. A painter, who made two por- 
traits of him, said that Keble "had one of the 
most remarkable faces he' had ever seen, for 
one who had eyes to see." It is told that he was 
shy and awkward with strangers, had moods 

33 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

of morbid melancholy, and, according to one 
who knew him, sometimes quickly lost his 
temper. He was fearless yet shrinking, strong 
yet tender — he frequently came away in tears 
from the sickbed of a parishioner. He was a 
defender of the poor — "I will not have my 
poor fellows laughed at," he protested, when 
some one called them "clodhoppers." He was 
a man of conspicuous gifts, a scholar, a poet, 
a writer of eminent ability, a preacher, and 
everywhere, in the pages of his books, in the 
delivery of his sermons, and in his home and 
parish life, there is seen, glowing like a fixed 
star, his simple, childlike humility. It is one 
of the most Christlike of traits in a preacher 
and most powerful. As Keble himself says in 
one of his poems : 

"To gentlest touches sweetest notes reply. 
Still humbleness with her low-breathed voice 
Can steal o'er man's proud heart, and win his choice 
From earth to heaven, with mightier witchery 
Than eloquence or wisdom e'er could own." 

Some one who visited him went away and 
wrote: "I never saw anyone who came up so 
completely to my ideas of a religious man as 
Keble, and yet I never saw anyone who made 
so little display of it (I use this word for want 
of a better at present) ; he seems to me a union 

34 



HURSLEY 

of Hooker and George Herbert — the humility 
of the one with the feeling and love of the other. 
In short, altogether he is a man whom the 
more you see of and know, the less you must 
think of yourself." 

Keble's love for the Church of England was 
a passion. He was jealous of her innocence, 
her good name, her purity, her freedom. With 
the Oxford, or Tract arian Movement, which 
was an honest attempt to recall the church to 
a truer sense of its responsibilities, and to re- 
establish the church, its sacraments and ordi- 
nances, in its rightful place in the life of indi- 
viduals and of the nation, Keble's name will 
be forever associated, — one of the "triumvirs 
who became a national force and gave its real 
character to the Oxford Movement," James 
Anthony Froude thought, the others being 
Pusey and John Henry Newman. 

Between Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude, 
a brother of the historian, who was early cut 
off, but who while he lived was one of the most 
active of the Oxford group, there was what the 
biographer of the latter calls "an exquisite 
friendship." It was his influence which brought 
together Keble and Newman, and he later 
wrote to Newman, "Do keep writing to Keble 
and stirring his rage. He is my fire, and I may 

35 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

be his poker." They loved one another with a 
great affection. Keble, the Sunday after 
Froude's death, which must have been his 
own first Sunday at Hursley as vicar, broke 
down completely, and for some moments could 
not proceed. Newman's principles as the ac- 
tive leader of the Oxford Movement were 
undoubtedly imbibed from his intercourse with 
Froude and Keble, and in his "Apologia," as I 
have said before, he refers to Keble as "the 
true and primary author of it." This great 
movement within the Church of England was 
at its height when Keble came to Hursley, for 
it he was largely responsible, and although he 
could not, as did Newman, forsake the church 
of his birth and of his love, and enter the 
Church of Rome, it colored his thought and 
his work. Naturally buoyant, of high spirits, 
full of play, "the greatest boy of them all," 
the gardener at Southrop said, a lover of fun, 
when that conception of the church, to make 
which a reality he devoted his whole life, laid 
hold of him, all his natural inclinations were 
subordinated to a deep seriousness which dis- 
closed itself thereafter in many ways. Hurrell 
Froude was one day discussing Law's "Serious 
Call," a book which influenced Keble deeply, 
as it had influenced men like John Wesley and 

36 




FOUNTAIN AT AMPFIELD 




AMPFIELD CHURCH 



HURSLEY 

Samuel Johnson at an earlier period, and made 
concerning it what seemed to his mentor a 
careless remark. Later Keble said to him, 
"Froude, you thought Law's 'Serious Call' was 
a clever book; it seemed to me as if you had 
said that the Day of Judgment was a pretty 
sight." The Oxford Movement largely de- 
termined his career, but it did not make him, 
as was fondly hoped by some of its leading 
spirits, "a second Ambrose." 

Keble was a country minister, and as a 
preacher his biographers think he will be best 
known as a parish preacher. His sermons were 
what a bishop of the Church of England said 
sermons should be — "pious instructions to lead 
men to heaven, and save them from hell." 
Pusey thought that their chief characteristics 
were affectionate simplicity and intense reality, 
the first-named characteristic being the result 
of a deliberate purpose. "They said to me," 
Keble told a friend, "that I was preaching 
over the people's heads, and so I changed my 
style." That was early in his ministry at 
Hursley. He always spoke extemporaneously; 
his illustrations were drawn from the scenes 
and details of village life. ' He was direct, win- 
some, and intense, even dramatic sometimes. 
"He spoke of good angels," said a hearer, 

37 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

"their loving ministry, and their presence in 
church briefly, but in words so simple and real 
that it seemed as if the rustling of their wings 
were close around." 

This country minister, this poet-preacher, 
died March 29, 1866, and was buried in the 
Hursley churchyard, not far from the entrance 
to the church which is his memorial. The day 
he was laid to rest it was decided by some of 
the friends who stood about his grave that the 
worthiest monument which could be erected to 
perpetuate his memory and influence would be 
the building of a college at Oxford, and ten 
years later Canon Liddon preached at the 
opening of the Chapel of Keble College from 
the text, "The new man which is renewed unto 
knowledge, after the image of him that created 
him." And in the sermon the great preacher 
of Saint Paul's Cathedral said this true word: 

"It is not high station, or commanding 
wealth, or great public exploits, or wide popu- 
larity of opinions, which will explain the foun- 
dation of this college — raised as it is to the 
memory of a quiet country clergyman, with a 
very moderate income, who sedulously avoided 
public distinctions, and held tenaciously to an 
unpopular school all his life. Keble College is a 
witness to the homage which goodness carried 

38 




INTERIOR CHAPEL KEBLE COLLEGE, OXFORD 




GRAVES OF JOHN KEBLE AND HIS WIFE 



HURSLEY 

into the world of thought, or, indeed, into any 
other sphere of activity, extorts from all of us, 
when we are fairly placed face to face with it; 
it is a proof that neither station, nor wealth, 
nor conspicuousness, nor popularity is the 
truest and ultimate test of greatness. True 
greatness is to be recognized in character; and 
in a place like this character is largely, if not 
chiefly, shaped by the degree in which moral 
qualities are brought to bear upon the activi- 
ties of mind. The more men really know of 
him who, being dead, has, in virtue of the 
rich gifts of grace with which God had en- 
dowed him, summoned this college into being, 
the less will they marvel at such a tribute to 
his profound and enduring influence." 

Six weeks after Keble's death his devoted 
wife was carried to her resting place in the 
churchyard by his side. As we walked from 
the double grave down the path to the lich- 
gate the dear Lady of my pilgrimage said, "It 
seems as if we were going away from friends"; 
then, after a moment of reverent silence, she 
added, "But we have other friends at Bemer- 
ton," and we entered our conveyance and rode 
away past Ampfield Church, through Romsey, 
over Salisbury Plain to Salisbury, and beyond 
to the country parish of good George Herbert. 

39 



BEMERTOX 

Bemerton has long been a shrine. When 
Emerson was in England in 1847, ^ e w ^nt 
with Carlyle on an excursion to Stonehenge, 
which neither had seen. Their route took 
them through Hampshire, a county in which 
Carlyle was accustomed to spend part of every 
summer and his familiarity with which, Emerson 
records, "made the way short." There must 
have been much delightful converse as they 
passed through the county, one of the most 
highly favored in all England, and full of 
literary associations. They must have talked 
of Izaak Walton, who himself said that "Hamp- 
shire exceeds all England"; of Jane Austen, 
of whom Lord Macaulay could speak with 
admiration, and who was placed by Tennyson 
next to Shakespeare — at least if Carlyle were 
in good humor that day; of Thomas Ken, 
who wrote the Te Denm of universal Chris- 
tianity, "Praise God, from whom all blessings 
flow"; of Young, the poet of the "Xight 
Thoughts"; of William Gilpin and Gilbert 
White; and of the long line of distinguished 
men before the Norman conquest, who were 

40 



BEMERTON 

among the most famous makers of English 
history. They leave the train at Salisbury, 
go to Stonehenge, and the following day to 
Wilton Hall, where "the magnificent lawn on 
which grew the finest cedars in all England," 
much impressed Emerson; they then returned 
by coach to Salisbury, stopping en route at 
Bemerton. 

In 1880, Lecky, the historian, who had been 
visiting at Farringford, Lord Tennyson's home, 
went with the poet to visit the same points 
of interest. They found the garden at Wilton 
"a perfect dream of beauty." And there they 
long sat and talked. Of what they talked, it 
is easy to conjecture, for Wilton Hall, the 
far-famed seat of the Earls of Pembroke, and 
most intimately connected with the life of 
George Herbert, is among the most notable 
of English manor halls. History, poetry, and 
romance, have all united to give it renown. 
Eleven centuries ago a Saxon earl, wounded 
in battle and lying at the point of death, 
founded a chantry here. Thirty years later 
King Egbert, at the request of his sister Alburga, 
converted the church into a religious house for 
women, the princess herself becoming the first 
prioress. When Alfred had become king, and 
war had desolated the land, and this priory 

41 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

had been destroyed, Alfred founded in its stead 
a monastery, choosing for its site the spot 
where his palace formerly had stood. In the 
reign of Henry VIII, the dissolution of 
the monastery seems to have been effected 
with the absence of the violent proceedings 
which were necessary in other places. An old 
historian relates that the house gave no trouble 
whatever and quietly surrendered on the 25th 
day of March, 1539. The monastery, its in- 
mates having departed, its ecclesiastical fittings 
having been removed, was shortly after the 
dissolution leveled to the ground, and its site, 
together with its territorial possessions, granted 
by the king to Sir William Herbert. Here, on 
this site of the ancient church of Saint Edith, 
toward the close of the reign of Henry VIII, 
a stately mansion made from plans prepared 
by the celebrated painter Hans Holbein, 
and built under his direction, arose. In 
July, 1 551, Edward VI, then in his fifteenth 
year, who had but recently recovered from an 
attack of the measles and smallpox, started 
on a royal journey through some of the 
western counties, accompanied, so the diary 
which he kept reads, "by an imposing cavalcade 
of four thousand horsemen, ' ' and in due course 
arrived at Wilton for a visit. 

42 



BEMERTON 

With the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, 
a period of unusual splendor and romantic 
interest begins for the lordly house of Wilton. 
Here the youth of Philip Massinger was spent . 
Here Sir Philip Sidney, the idol of his time, 
"the darling of the court and of the camp," 
after a quarrel with the Earl of Oxford, and 
a mild rebuke by the queen for not paying 
due respect to his superiors, a rebuke which 
his haughty spirit could not endure, withdrew 
from the court to the seat of his. brother-in- 
law, the Earl of Pembroke, where, to while 
away his leisure hours, he wrote that remark- 
able book which was never completed, and 
which, unfinished, was given to the world after 
his death, "The Countess of Pembroke's Ar- 
cadia," commonly known as Sidney's "Arcadia," 
a book all the fashion in England at the time 
George Herbert was born, only seven years 
after the death of the author. 

Here at Wilton the incomparable Shakespeare 
walked and talked and acted, as we shall see. 
And hither Spenser was brought by his friend 
Sidney, and it is more than likely that some 
of the picturesque descriptions of landscape 
scenery in the "Faerie Queene" were suggested 
to Spenser by the natural objects which he 
saw in Wilton Park. 

43 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

The visit of Queen Elizabeth to Wilton Hall, 
in the course of one of her numerous royal 
tours, produced a pageant unapproached in the 
illustrious annals of the House of Pembroke. 
There is a graphic description of the visit and 
its brilliant festivities, written by a member of 
the royal party, which the Lady, who has 
just read it, wants me to give; the quaint 
account begins thus: "The Queenes Majesty 
returning from Bristowe on her Progresse Anno 
XVI. of her Majestyes Raigne, the 3rd day 
of September, being Friday, her Highnesse was 
receaved by the same Earle," etc., — but I tell 
her it is quite too long, delightfully interesting 
as it is, for a place here. And besides, any- 
one who is interested can find a like picture 
in Sir Walter Scott's "Kenilworth. " I must, 
however, share with my readers the concluding 
statement: "during all which tyme her Majesty 
was here, she was boeth merry and pleasant." 
But, then, Elizabeth usually had a pretty 
good "tyme." 

Sir Philip Sidney came to Wilton often. 
His only surviving sister had married Lord 
Herbert, the oldest son of the then Earl of 
Pembroke, in 1576; she was a woman whose 
virtues have been commemorated by Jonson, 
Spenser, and other less well-known poets, and 

44 



BEMERTON 

Sir Philip was devoted to her. Among the 
descriptive passages in the "Arcadia" the reader 
who is familiar with the park and the pleasure 
grounds at Wilton, which Tennyson rapturously- 
called "paradisaical," will have no difficulty in 
recognizing the accuracy of the following land- 
scape drawing, evidently sketched on the spot: 
"There were hilles which garnished their proud 
heights with stately trees; humble vallies, whose 
base estate seemed comforted with refreshing 
of silver rivers; medowes, enameld with all 
sortes of ey-pleasing floures; thickets, which 
being lined with most pleasant shade, were 
witnessed so, too, by the cherefull disposition 
of many well-tuned birds; ech pasture stored 
with sheepe feeding with sober securitie, while 
the pretie lambes with bleating oratorie craued 
the dams comfort; here a shepheard's boy 
piping, as though he neuer should be old; 
there a young shepherdesse knitting, and withall 
singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted 
her hands to worke, and her hands kept time 
to her voice's musick." 

It was here that James I witnessed the first 
theatrical representation , which he had seen 
in England. So great was the king's delight 
with the play that at the close he inquired 
if the author of it was among the players, 

45 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

and his host replying in the affirmative, 
was directed to introduce him to the monarch, 
in order that he might receive in person the 
royal commendation of his play. The play 
was the comedy of "Twelfth Night," and the 
dramatist who knelt before the king for his 
approval was William Shakespeare. 

It was from such surroundings, from such 
an atmosphere, from such a circle of friends 
and relatives that George Herbert went to be 
a country parson in the little parish of Bemerton, 
in 1630. The Earl of Pembroke it was who 
made the request of Charles I, a guest at Wilton 
Hall at the time, that he would bestow the 
living of Bemerton upon his kinsman, and 
when the king indicated his willingness to 
grant the request, George Herbert came to 
Wilton Hall to receive the favor in person 
from the king. 

Did Wordsworth when he wrote in "The 
Excursion" his idyllic description of a country 
pastor among the mountains have Herbert in 
mind ? It is not improbable. 

"The calm delights 
Of unambitious piety he chose, 
And learning's solid dignity; though born 
Of knightly race, nor wanting powerful friends. 
Hither, in prime of manhood, he withdrew 
From academic bowers. He loved the spot- 

46 




WILTON HALL 




BEMERTON CHURCH : WEST FRONT 



BEMERTON 

Who does not love his native soil? — he prized 

The ancient rural character, composed 

Of simple manners, feelings unsupprest 

And undisguised, and strong and serious thought 

A character reflected in himself, 

With such embellishment as well beseems 

His rank and sacred function. This deep vale 

Winds far in reaches hidden from our sight, 

And one a turreted manorial hall 

Adorns, in which the good Man's ancestors 

Have dwelt through ages — Patrons of this Cure. 

To them, and to his own judicious pains, 

The Vicar's dwelling, and the whole domain, 

Owes that presiding aspect which might well 

Attract your notice ; statelier than could else 

Have been bestowed, through course of common chance, 

On an un wealthy mountain Benefice." 

It must be already apparent that the 
Bemerton pastor belonged to a family of 
distinction. His father, Sir Richard Herbert, 
owned two estates, one of them Montgomery 
Castle in North Wales, where, April 3, 1593, 
George Herbert was born. The Herberts of 
Montgomery were a race of soldiers, tall, hand- 
some, noted for courage rather than intellect, 
who quarreled easily and lived roughly. His 
brothers, most of them, were lovers of war. 
Some of them died in battle. But George 
Herbert seems not to have been strong enough 
for the hardships of the march and the "fiery 
field," and it was this fact of his ill health, 

47 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

he thought, which drew him to the scholar's 
life, but more probably was it the influence 
of his mother, who, in an age of remarkable 
women, was an accomplished musician, a lover 
of literature, a woman of beauty and social 
charm. • 

Herbert's father having died when George 
was but four years old, his education devolved 
largely upon his mother, who went to Oxford 
that he might study there, and later moved 
to London, where the boy entered Westmin- 
ster School, of which at the time Lancelot 
Andrewes, one of the greatest preachers of the 
day, was dean. In 1609 Herbert won a 
scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Five 
years later, he became a Fellow of his college 
and instructor in rhetoric, and began the 
systematic study of divinity. In 16 19, the 
oratorship of Cambridge University having be- 
come vacant. Herbert eagerly sought to secure 
the place, and obtaining it, held it for eight 
years. The orations and official letters of this 
period, which Professor Palmer calls "his period 
of hesitation," when dreams of political emi- 
nence swayed him, subordinating while not 
altogether destroying his plan to become a 
minister, show him to have been a skillful 
courtier and little more. So well, indeed, did 

48 



BEMERTON 

he do this work of laudation that he attracted 
the notice of the king, who henceforth re- 
garded him as "the jewel of that university," 
and whenever the king went to hunt at Royston 
near Cambridge, he was usually accompanied 
by the university's official maker of sweet phrases 
and pretty sentences. 

Here, at Cambridge, he made other influential 
friends also. He came to know Herrick, the 
poet and divine, who enjoys a better reputa- 
tion as a poet than as a divine, dying in his 
Devonshire parish, a lone man, sick and tired 
of the convivial life which he had spent in 
London; Milton, who came to Cambridge as 
a student in 1624, three years before Herbert 
left; Cromwell and Jeremy Taylor, who were 
both born at Cambridge in 16 13; Sir Henry 
Wotton, the successful diplomat, and Nicholas 
Ferrer, the scholar-merchant who gave up 
public life for religious seclusion. More im- 
portant than these even, though, were such 
powerful friends as the Duke of Lenox, the 
Duke of Richmond, the Marquis of Hamilton, 
who became his patron, and Lord Bacon, 
whom he met in 1620, the beginning of a help- 
ful, stimulating friendship which continued with 
increasing closeness until Bacon's death. Dr. 
John Donne, too, the brilliant Dean of Saint 

49 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Paul's Cathedral, London, the fascinating con- 
versationalist and unusual preacher and poet, 
became his firm friend. He had long been 
the friend of Herbert's mother; addressed to 
her his lines on "Autumnal Beauty," beginning, 

"Nor spring nor summer beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face," 

and his sonnet "Saint Mary Magdalene," and 
at her funeral preached one of his greatest 
sermons. 

But in the political life of England no one 
of these had larger influence than Herbert's 
great kinsman, the Earl of Pembroke. When, 
therefore, George Herbert indicated his ambition 
to enter political life, the earl actively favored 
it, and would undoubtedly have succeeded in 
placing him in some foreign court, had not 
the strong will of Herbert's mother prevented 
his abandoning his thought of the ministry; 
and when, in 1627, she died, Herbert, now 
thirty-four years of age. resigned the oratorship 
and gave himself to the work for which that 
faithful mother had long felt he was pre- 
eminently fitted. His decision, however, did 
not approve itself to many of his aristocratic 
friends. It passed understanding how a gentle- 
man of noble lineage, a courtier, and a social 

50 



BEMERTON 

favorite could choose the ministry, especially 
in a century when the morals of the clergy 
were so low that the saintly Bishop Andrewes 
used to ask the people on his visitation rounds: 
"Doth your minister resort to any taverns or 
ale houses ? . . . Doth he use any base or servile 
labour, drinking, riot, dice, cards, tables, or 
any unlawful games? Is he contentious, a 
hunter, hawker, swearer, dancer, usurer?" and 
when the office was generally held in con- 
tempt. One of these friends to whom he 
confided his purpose of entering into holy 
orders urged him not to do so, on the ground 
that it was too mean an employment, but 
Herbert replied: "It hath been formerly ad- 
judged that the domestic servants of the King 
of Heaven should be of the noblest families 
on earth; and though the iniquity of the late 
times have made Clergymen meanly valued, 
and the sacred name of Priest contemptible, 
yet I will labor to make it honorable by conse- 
crating all my learning, and all my poor abilities, 
to advance the glory of that God that gave 
them; knowing that I can never do too much 
for him that hath done so much for me as 
to make me a Christian. ' And I will labor to 
be like my Saviour, by making humility lovely 
in the eyes of all men, and by following the 

5* 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

merciful and meek example of my dear Jesus." 
And he did both. From that day to this he 
has been known as "holy Mr. Herbert," and 
beyond any man of his day he succeeded in 
making the profession "honorable" in the eyes 
of men. 

It was three years after his decision that 
Bemerton, which is on the high road between 
Wilton and Salisbury, about three miles from 
the former, and a mile and a half from the 
latter, was offered him. Three hundred years 
have worked striking changes. Then Bemerton 
was open country, now it is practically a 
suburb of Salisbury. When Herbert used to 
make his regular twice-a-week visit to that 
city, it was a walk of perhaps half an hour 
across smiling fields, through which the Nadder 
flows with many a graceful curve, but we 
covered the distance in less than ten minutes — 
considerable less I have some reason to sus- 
pect — in the automobile which had brought us 
from Hursley across Salisbury Plain. When we 
asked a small boy by the roadside to direct 
us to the Bemerton church, he pointed across 
the fields, and leaving the car, over the fields 
we went, only to find ourselves looking upon 
the present parish church, with the shadow of 
a giant elm upon it. But the little ivy-covered 

5 2 




THE NEW BEMERTON CHURCH 




BISHOP S PALACE, SALISBURY 



BEMERTON 

church of Saint Andrew, which Herbert found 
in decay, and almost immediately restored, is 
only a short distance off, and we soon stood 
by its altar, and above Herbert's grave. 

The chapel is a diminutive structure, only 
eighteen feet wide by forty-six long, with seats 
for about fifty people. Though many changes 
have been made in the little building since 
Herbert's day, it is much the same now as 
when he became rector of the parish, and 
when during the ceremony of induction, shut up 
in the church alone to toll the bell, as required 
by a curious law on such an occasion, he re- 
mained so long that his friends, growing anxious, 
looked in at the window, and saw him pros- 
trate on the ground before the altar, engaged, 
as he afterward told them, in framing rules 
for his life as a parish priest. How faithfully 
he kept these rules we shall see. 

It was in 1630, the year following his mar- 
riage to Jane Danvers after a courtship of 
three days, that he entered upon his duties 
at Bemerton. The third day thereafter, when 
he had changed his sword and silk clothes 
for a canonical coat, he returned to Bainton, 
where his wife was, and' greeted her thus: 
"You are now a minister's wife, and must now 
as far forget your father's house as not to 

53 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

claim a precedence of any of your parishioners ; 
for you are to know, that a priest's wife can 
challenge no precedence or place, but that 
which she purchaseth by her obliging humility; 
and I am sure places so purchased do best 
become them. And let me tell you, that I am 
so good a herald, as to assure you that this 
is truth." And not even the saintly Herbert 
was more devoted to the people of the parish 
than was "Mistress Jane. ' ' She was the almoner 
of his charities, his constant counselor, and 
consistently sympathetic with his aims. 

The rectory, like the church, was much out 
of repair. The bishop, when he inducted him, 
had reminded him that it was to the "more 
pleasant than healthful parsonage of Bemerton." 
The house, which is almost a part of the church, 
being separated from it only by the narrow 
road, has been doubled in size since Herbert 
built it, but there remains enough of the old 
building to enable one to recall it as it was 
when the country parson and his wife, with 
their three nieces, lived in it those three fruitful 
years, the most significant of Herbert's all too 
short life. 

The servant who answers our summons and 
admits us almost mechanically leads us directly 
into the old study, or "writing closet," as 

54 



BEMERTON 

Herbert styled it, which, like the living room 
across the hall from it, is practically unchanged 
after all the years. "Just there he wrote many 
of his poems," said our suave attendant, as he 
pointed to a small desk between the old- 
fashioned windows, which open on the street, 
and from which one can almost touch the 
porch of the church, so near it is. It was 
there then that he must have written that 
"Inscription to My Successor" which he caused 
to be engraved on the mantel of the chimney 
in the hall, and which we had paused long 
enough to read before stepping across the 
threshold into the study: 

"If thou chance for to find 
A new House to thy mind, 

And built without thy cost, 
Be good to the Poor, 
As God gives thee store, 

And then my Labour's not lost." 

In this tiny room he composed the best of 
his verse. He had written little, in fact, before 
coming to Bemerton, and had published none 
whatsoever. In the three years of his life here, 
he wrote more than half of his poems, and his 
immortal "Country Parson " besides. Among his 
Bemerton poems were those entitled "Avarice," 
"Justice," "Giddinesse," "Vanitie," "Constan- 

55 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

cie," and that highly praised bit of verse 
called "Yertue": 

"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
The bridall of the earth and skie, 
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight; 
For thou must die. 

"Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave, 
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, 
Thy root is ever in its grave, 
And thou must die. 

"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses. 
A box where sweets compacted He, 
My musick shows ye have your closes. 
And all must die. 

"Onely a sweet and vertuous soul. 
Like season'd timber, never gives; 
But though the whole world turn to coal, 
Then chiefly lives." 

The most extended poem of the Bemerton 
3 7 ears was that on "Providence," which was 
based on Psalm 104. 24. "0 Lord, how mani- 
fold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made 
them all." Throughout the entire long poem 
he had in mind this beautiful psalm, which, in 
the King James Version, a version which just 
at that time was attracting much attention and 
was being widely used, having appeared in 
161 1. is entitled "An exhortation to bless the 
Lord for his mighty power and providence," 

56 



BEMERTON 

his purpose being to give, as its closing stanzas 
show, "a kind of climax and epitome of all 
his thought." Some of the figures of speech 
and the illustrations of these, and other of the 
Bemerton productions were undoubtedly sug- 
gested to him by the quiet rural scenery of 
the parish, and especially that through which 
he passed in his walks between the retired 
parsonage and the ancient cathedral city. 
"Every foot of the mile and more of nearly 
level high-road, with its bordering fields, flowers, 
and hedges, must have become intimately 
known to him; as his own slender figure, in 
its dark clerical habit and white bands, could 
not fail to grow familiar to all who lived or 
went by the way." 

The story of Herbert's devotion to the 
people of the Bemerton parish, as told by 
Walton, is one of the most charming pictures 
in literary biography. His parish was his chief 
care. The clergymen of his age were, as has 
been said, scandalously indifferent to the needs 
of their flocks. But Herbert entered upon the 
incumbency of Bemerton determined to rescue 
the office from reproach. No man ever took 
his mission more seriously. His ideal of the 
preacher, which he sought to attain unto, 
he discloses in his poem, "The Windows," 

57 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the theme doubtless being suggested by the 
windows of the cathedral, where there are said 
to be as many windows as days of the year. 
The teaching of the poem is that the preacher's 
heavenly doctrine must shine through his own 
life before it can influence those who would 
see God, now as then a true teaching: 

"Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? 
He is a brittle crazie glasse ; 
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford 
This glorious and transcendent place, 
To be a window, through thy grace. 

"But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, 
Making thy life to shine within 
The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie 
More rev 'rend grows, and more doth win; 
Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin. 

"Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one 
"When the}* combine and mingle, bring 
A strong regard and aw; but speech alone 
Doth vanish like a flaring thing, 
And in the eare, not conscience, ring." 

Herbert assuredly realized in some measure his 
own high ideal. Walton is undoubtedly extrav- 
agant. His biography is poetic and charming, 
and by no means searching or judicial, but 
there must have been some ground for his 
fervid rhetoric, as when he writes: "I have 
now brought him to the parsonage of Bemerton, 

58 




BEMERTON RECTORY 




BEMERTON CHURCH 



BEMERTON 

and to the thirty-sixth year of his age, and 
must stop here, and bespeak the reader to 
prepare for an almost incredible story, of the 
great sanctity of the short remainder of his 
holy life; a life so full of charity, humility, 
and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the 
eloquence of Saint Chrysostom to commend and 
declare it; a life that, if it were related by a 
pen like his, there would then be no need for 
this age to look back into times past for the 
examples of primitive piety, for they might be 
all found in the life of George Herbert." He 
was unquestionably a saintly man, "certainly 
one of the most perfect characters which the 
Anglican Church has nourished," says a modern 
critic, who has never been found guilty of 
having too much sentiment. He was devoutly 
religious, and religiously devout. Whenever he 
made mention of the name of Jesus Christ, 
even in ordinary conversation, he would add, 
"My Master." So profound was his affection 
for the Word of God that he was "heard to 
make solemn protestation that he would not 
part with one leaf thereof for the whole world, 
if it were offered him in exchange." When 
a friend sought to comfort him on his death- 
bed by recalling his part in the restoration of 
some church, as being an especially good work, 

59 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

he replied, "It is a good work, if it be sprinkled 
with the bloud of Christ." It was in this 
spirit of devotion to his Lord, of fervent belief 
in his redemptive work, and of confidence in 
his Word that Herbert ministered to the small 
group of two or three hundred souls "in a 
village remote from city, court and university." 
It was his daily habit of worship to appear 
with his entire household in the little chapel 
across the road from the parsonage "strictly 
at the canonical hours of ten and four, and 
then and there he lifted up pure and charitable 
hands to God in the midst of the congregation." 
Many of his parishioners joined in these daily 
prayers, and others who could not attend, 
"stayed their ploughs when the bells rung to 
prayers." 

Like every minister of God Herbert had 
numerous parish experiences, which almost 
better than anything else disclose the spirit 
in which he did his pastoral work. Walton 
relates several, one or two of which I give 
largely as Walton describes them: "In a walk 
to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a poorer 
horse, that was fallen under his load; they 
were both in distress and needed present help; 
which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his 
canonical coat and helped the poor man to 

60 



BEMERTON 

unload and after to load to his horse. The 
poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed 
the poor man; and was so like the good Samar- 
itan, that he gave him money to refresh both 
himself and his horse; and told him, 'That if 
he loved himself, he should be merciful to 
the beast.' Thus he left the poor man; and at 
his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, 
they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, 
that used to be so trim and clean, come into 
that company so soiled and discomposed; but 
he told them the occasion. And when one of 
the company told him, 'He had disparaged 
himself by so dirty an employment,' his answer 
was, 'that the thought of what he had done 
would prove music to him at midnight; and 
that the omission of it would have upbraided 
and made discord in his conscience, whensoever 
he should pass by that place; for if I be bound 
to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure 
that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, 
to practise what I pray for. And though I 
do not wish for the like occasion every day, 
yet let me tell you, I would not willingly 
pass one day of my life without comforting 
a sad soul, or showing mercy; and I praise 
God for this occasion. And now let us tune 
our instruments.' " 

61 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

He also gives another incident, which illus- 
trates Herbert's purpose to be the friend of 
the poorest of his flock. There appeared at 
the parsonage one day an old woman who 
came "with an intent to acquaint him with 
her necessitous condition, as also with some 
troubles of her mind: but after she had spoke 
some few words to him, she was surprised 
with a fear, and that begot shortness of breath, 
so that her spirits and speech failed her." 
But she was quickly reassured by the great- 
hearted parson, who "told her, 'he would be 
acquainted with her, and take her into his 
care.' And having with patience heard and 
understood her wants (and it is some relief 
for a poor body to be heard with patience), 
he, like a Christian clergyman, comforted her 
by his meek behaviour and counsel: but be- 
cause that cost him nothing, he relieved her 
with money too, and so sent her home with 
a cheerful heart, praising God and praying for 
him." Thus this village parson, with his dis- 
ciplined mind, broadly cultured — he could speak 
French, Italian, and Spanish, and wrote numer- 
ous poems in Greek or Latin — well acquainted 
with the sciences, with a passion for strong 
friendships, fastidious, proud, an aristocrat all 
his days, yet genuinely humble and sympathetic, 

62 



BEMERTON 

labored in the country parish which had been 
committed to his care, with a cheerful zeal 
and a self-effacing devotedness which won for 
it and for him an immortality of fame. 

Bemerton has blessed the world with two 
gifts, both of measureless value, one a "pattern 
of 'reverent discipline and religious fear' with 
'soft obedience' and quiet labor; the other the 
pattern of the true spiritual shepherd in the 
midst of his flock, preaching, teaching and 
exhorting to righteousness." Both these have 
been curiously fashioned into two books which 
Herbert made when not ministering unto the 
necessities of his people, or reading prayers or 
preaching in the chapel : — 

"This aisle George Herbert paced, and in this choir 
With fervent music charged his pen, 
And quaintly wrought his lines of pleading fire 
Excusing unto God the ways of men." 

One of these "The Temple," appeared in 1631. 
Its success was instantaneous; its influence has 
continued to this day. The title of it indi- 
cates the author's purpose. Herbert loved the 
church. Puritan influences were at work, but 
he was not moved by them, save to accord 
the sermon a larger place in the service of 
worship. In the Leighton Bromswold Church, 
one of the churches of his parish, the reading 

63 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

desk and pulpit were of equal height, and in 
lines which are well known he seems to give 
the precedence to prayer, as he undoubtedly 
did always: 

"Resort to sermons, but to prayers most: 
Praying's the end of preaching. O, be drest; 
Stay not for th' other pin ! Why, thou hast lost 
A joy for it worth worlds. Thus Hell doth jest 

Away thy blessings, and extremely flout thee; 

Thy clothes being fast, but thy soul loose about thee." 

But in the Bemerton Church he had the pulpit 
raised to the same height as the reading desk, 
in order that the people might value the ser- 
mon equally with the prayers. This, however, 
was but a slight concession to the bellicose 
Puritanism of the age. Yet it should be said 
that his contention that the individual soul 
may come into immediate personal communion 
with God, and his insistence upon personal 
responsibility are also Puritan. Nevertheless he 
was a High Churchman, ardently devoted to 
the Church of England, even hostile to her 
foes, almost as insistent as John Keble on an 
elaborate ritual, writing with the same pas- 
sionate ardor as the author of "The Christian 
Year." 

"I joy, deare Mother, when I view 
Thy perfect lineaments, and hue 
Both sweet and bright." 

64 




saint John's college, Cambridge 




IMflf 




INTERIOR OLD BEMERTON CHURCH 



BEMERTON 

"The Temple" is the tribute of a devoted son 
to his spiritual Mother. No book in the 
English language is fuller of devotion to the 
Church of England than this, and it is averred 
that no poem of our literature exhibits more 
of the spirit of true Christianity. The book is 
made up of a series of poems on the various 
parts of the church building and its services 
of worship and teachings, beginning with "The 
Church Porch." The concluding lines of the 
first stanza — 

"A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, 
And turn delight into a sacrifice" — 

reveal the poet's intention. He is starting out 
to preach, and makes no attempt to conceal 
it. The poems of "The Temple" are as didactic 
and hortatory as much of Longfellow's verse. 
Herbert is always the preacher, and of "The 
Temple" he seeks to make "a plain man's 
guide to holiness." How he preached can per- 
haps best be seen in one of the best known 
of his poems, "The Pulley," by which Herbert 
meant God's means of drawing us to him: 

"When God at first made man, 
Having a glasse of blessings standing by, 
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can ; 
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie, 
Contract into a span. 

65 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

"So strength, first made a way, 
Then beautie flow'd, then wisdome, honour, pleasure; 
When almost all was out, God made a stay, 
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure, 
Rest in the bottome lay. 

"For if I should, said he, 
Bestow this jewell also on my creature, 
He would adore my gifts instead of me, 
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: 
So both should losers be. 

' ' Yet let him keep the rest, 
But keep them with repining restlessness; 
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least, 
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse 
May tosse him to my breast." 

Between Herbert's death, in 1633. and 1709 
thirteen editions were published, a second edi- 
tion being called for the first year. In 1670 
Walton estimated that twenty thousand copies 
had been sold. Then came a century of 
neglect, but at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, Coleridge, who much admired Herbert 
as a poet, holding that quaint as are some of 
Herbert's conceits his poems "are for the most 
part exquisite in their kind," called attention 
to him, with the result that Herbert again 
came into his own. 

Herbert may have been a minor poet, as 
he has been classed, but he was by no means 
a second-rate parson. His life at Bemerton 

66 



BEMERTON 

was an illustration of the gospel he preached, 
and a commentary on his own works, for it 
is the testimony of Walton, that "he did 
never turn his face from any that he saw in 
need, but would relieve them, especially his 
poor neighbors, to the meanest of whose houses 
he would go, and inform himself of their wants, 
and relieve them cheerfully, if they were in 
distress, and would always praise God, as 
much for being willing, as for being able to 
do it." But better than this testimony of 
Walton, is the picture of himself, which Herbert 
so faithfully portrays in "The Country Parson," 
a book as truly autobiographical as Newman's 
"Apologia." "I have resolved to set down the 
form and character of a true Pastor," writes 
the author to his readers, "that I may have 
a Mark to aim at." This admirable book, 
which will add to the value of any library, no 
matter how complete otherwise, appeared in 
1652, nearly twenty years after Herbert's death, 
with the double title "The Priest to the Temple, 
or The Countrey Parson, His Character and Rule 
of Life." The first, however, has been tacitly 
dropped, Herbert undoubtedly having given 
only the latter part, "The* Countrey Parson," 
with which words, printed in capitals, he opens 
thirty-four of the thirty-seven chapters. The 

67 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

importance which he attaches to this title is 
abundantly evidenced. While throughout the 
book he uses "priest," "pastor," and "minister" 
interchangeably, no one of them has the prom- 
inence or significance of "the countrey parson." 
The book has "a certain double aim." Pri- 
marily it was a study of the conditions in 
which this country parson found himself, writ- 
ten as a guide in his own work, but at the 
same time intended as a help to others. It 
was a record both of his aspirations and of 
his experiences, and its practical value was 
extraordinary. The ministry of Herbert's day, 
and especially the country ministry, was not 
taken seriously, neither was it held in high 
esteem. Herbert undertook, as I have said, to 
restore it to some worthy place in the thought 
and life of England. It is more than probable 
that "he himself became a country minister 
that he might show how it could become a 
field fit for intelligent, energetic, stately, and 
holy living. Every feature of the country 
minister's life is studied. Nothing is counted 
trivial." It is really a wonderful little treatise 
on pastoral theology, neither ephemeral in its 
teachings, nor local in their application. A few 
books only merit an imm ortality of fame and 
use. Herbert's "Country Parson" is such a 

68" 



BEMERTON 

book. No modern book of pastoral theology is 
richer in the wisdom of good sense or more 
prolific in helpful suggestions. The opening 
sentence, "A pastor is the deputy of Christ 
for the reducing of man to the obedience of 
God," is the keynote of the book, but every 
page yields ripe, wholesome fruit. 

"The Countrey Parson is exceeding exact in 
his Life, being holy, just, prudent, temperate, 
bold, grave in all his waves." 

"The Countrey Parson is very circumspect 
in avoiding all coveteousnesse, neither being 
greedy to get, nor nigardly to keep, nor troubled 
to lose any worldly wealth ; but in all his words 
and actions slightly and disestimating it, even 
to a wondering that the world should so much 
value wealth." 

"The Countrey Parson preacheth constantly; 
the pulpit is his joy and his throne. The 
character of his Sermon is Holiness. He is 
not witty, or learned, or eloquent but Holy." 

"The Countrey Parson when any of his cure 
is sick, or afflicted with losse of friend, or 
estate, or any ways distressed, fails not to 
afford his best comforts, and rather goes to 
them than sends for the afflicted, though they 
can and otherwise ought to come to him." 

"The Countrey Parson is a Lover of old 
69 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Customs, if they be good and harmlesse; and 
the rather, because Countrey people are much 
addicted to them, so that to favour them 
therein is to win their hearts, and to oppose 
them therein is to deject them." 

"The Countrey Parson's yea is yea, and nay, 
nay: and his apparel plain, but reverend and 
clean, without spots, or dust, or smell; the 
purity of the mind breaking out, and dilating 
itself even to his body, clothes, and habitation." 

"The Countrey Parson is full of all knowl- 
edge" and "condescends even to the knowledge 
of tillage and pasturage . . . because people by 
what they understand are best led to what 
they understand not." 

A wise parson was shrewd George Herbert. 
The most advanced specialist of "the country 
problem" could hardly desire more helpful 
assistance than he gives in his "The Country 
Parson." or conceive a more valuable contri- 
bution to the literature of the subject than 
this book. 

No man of his century, or any century 
indeed, has been more frequently quoted by 
writers on the pastoral office, or by other 
writers. Here is Lowell saying to his friend 
Loring: "In the fine old poet Herbert are as 
good arguments — the more pleasing for their 

70 



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GEORGE HERBERTS GARDEN 




"A SILVER STREAM SHALL ROLL HIS WATERS NEAR 



BEMERTON 

quaintness — for church-going as are to be 
found anywhere." And here is Holmes remark- 
ing concerning something that Emerson wrote 
that it is not any the worse for being the 
flowering out of a poetical bud of George 
Herbert's. The fact is Emerson, like George 
Macdonald, who ranked him far above all the 
company of religious singers, was very fond of 
Herbert, as may be judged by the praise 
which he bestowed on him, when he wrote, 
"Herbert is the psalmist dear to all who love 
religious poetry, with exquisite refinement of 
thought. Surely, so much piety was never 
wedded to so much wit." The best known 
teachers of pastoral theology have spoken, one 
might infer from reading their lectures, with a 
volume of George Herbert in their hands. Here 
is one who tells his students how "Even modest 
George Herbert when he began to preach, 
thought it necessary to awe the people by 
preaching to them a prodigiously learned ser- 
mon, in which he showed them that he was 
equal to the best as a 'Latiner'; but in his 
pious simplicity he informed them that he 
should not generally preach to them so learnedly 
as that, but henceforth he should try to save 
their souls." Another exhorts his hearers to 
emulate Herbert, who said on the day of his 

7i 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

induction to Bemerton, "I will be sure to live 
well, because the virtuous life of a clergyman 
is the most powerful eloquence to persuade all 
that see it to reverence and love, and at least 
to desire to live like him." Open almost any 
book and the familiar name will greet your 
eye: "The favorite saying of holy George 
Herbert, as he prepared to sing to his viol, 
'religion does not banish mirth, but only 
moderates and sets rules about it'"; or "The 
good minister must not only gather in, feed, 
and guide, but he must also guard. So George 
Herbert — himself a noble example of this virtue 
— says 'The parson, wherever he is, keeps God's 
watch.' : Xow it is a line, "George Herbert 
said, 'Nothing is small in God's service.' " And 
now a homely bit of poetic counsel : 

"By all means use sometimes to be alone. 

Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. 
Dare to look in thy chest, for 'tis thine own, 

And tumble up and down what thou find'st there. 

Who cannot rest till he good fellows finde. 

He breaks up house, turns out of doores his minde." 

And now it is some phrase, which has become 
a proverb, like "Kneeling ne'er spoiled silk 
stockings," or "All equal are within the Church's 
gate," or "Who lives by rule keeps good com- 
pany." Somehow that Bemerton poet-pastor 



BEMERTON 

very often struck a note which, when you 
have heard it, like the song of some strange 
bird, haunts you. 

"May we go into the garden?" the Lady 
asked after we had made the round of the 
rectory, and with some trepidation I noted, 
for we had early been told that the rector 
Was out there among his flowers. "I think per- 
haps I can venture to take you into it just 
a minute, though we are not supposed to 
admit visitors when the parson is there," said 
the shrewd lad who was butler to the house- 
hold and guide to strangers. His audacity was 
duly rewarded as it should have been, and as 
he probably expected it would be! He opened 
a door, and lo! we were in George Herbert's 
garden. Dear old George Herbert's garden. It 
seemed indeed like holy ground. There is an 
inexpressible charm in every old garden, but 
here — ! Cowley, who, like Pope, wrote poems 
in early boyhood, publishing a volume when he 
was thirteen, which was the year after Herbert 
came to Bemerton, a volume he must have 
read as he walked here in his quiet retreat, 
makes Diocletian say to the ambassadors who 
were enticing him to a throne: 

" 'If I, my friends,' said he, 'should to you show 
All the delights which in these gardens glow: 

73 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Tis likelier much that you should with me stay, 
Than 'tis that you should carry me away'!" 

It need not be said that George Herbert loved 
this garden. A modern English parson who 
has written delightfully concerning the flowers 
and shrubs and vines in the midst of which 
he dwells, says in one of his essays: "There 
is no love so great, save that of woman, as a 
man's love for his garden. Its charm is ever 
fresh when the sun shines brightly, or even in 
the depth of winter, for then it is the time 
for discussing possibilities, and the gardener is 
planning, waiting, and preparing for the ad- 
vent of spring and the joys of summer. It 
may not be a very elaborate garden, with orchid 
houses and vineries and conservatories galore; 
but it is just the little bit of God's earth that 
is left to the tending of one man and his partner 
in life, a Paradise as beautiful as Eden, if no 
serpents of evil come and mar its beauty." 

It takes little imagination to see that tall, 
erect, thin man, with a benignant face, and a 
gracious courtly air, humble withal, walking 
along the banks of the Nadder, as it flows 
silently away to join the Wiltshire and Hamp- 
shire Avon, one of the numerous less famous 
Avons of England. A good friend of mine, 
who also is a lover of gardens, and who visited 

74 




BEMERTON GARDEN: SUMMER HOUSE 




THE COUNTRY PARSON IN HIS GARDEN 
From the painting by W. Dyce, R.A. 



BEMERTON 

Bemerton just before we made our second pil- 
grimage there, wrote me in a dream of ecstasy: 
" Isn't it just the most charming garden ever, 
with that rich velvety lawn, and those laugh- 
ing flower beds, all shut in from the world, 
and the little river at the foot of the garden 
slipping by on its way to the spire of Salisbury. 
Think of having a private river all your own!" 

It almost seems as if Cowley must have had 
this garden in mind when he wrote 

"Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, 
Hear the soft winds above me flying, 
With all their wanton boughs dispute, 
And the more tuneful birds to both replying, 
Nor be myself, too, mute. 

"A silver stream shall roll his waters near, 
Gilt with the sunbeams here and there, 
On whose enamelled bank I'll walk, 
And see how prettily they smile, 
And hear how prettily they talk." 

"I spent a delightful day yesterday," wrote 
Charles Kingsley to his wife one summer morn 
in 1844. "Conceive my pleasure at finding my- 
self in Bemerton, George Herbert's parish, and 
seeing his house and church, and fishing in 
the very meadows where he, and Dr. Donne, 
and Izaak Walton, may have fished before me. 
The dazzling chalk- wolds sleeping in the sun, 
the clear river rushing and boiling down in 

75 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

one ever sliding sheet of transparent silver, 
the birds bursting into song, and mating and 
toying in every hedge row — everything stirred 
with the gleam of God's eyes, when 'He renew- 
eth the face of the earth!' I had many happy 
thoughts." And well he might. Others also 
have had happy thoughts in that peaceful 
garden. The day previous to his visit to 
Bemerton, Kingsley had spent in the Cathedral 
at Salisbury, and at the day's close wrote: "I 
have been walking around the Cathedral; oh! 
such a cathedral! Perfect unity, in extreme 
multiplicity. The first thing which strikes you 
in it (spiritually, I mean) is its severe and 
studied calm, even to a 'primness' — nothing 
luscious, very little or no variation. Then you 
begin to feel how one it is; how the high slated 
roof and the double lancet windows, and the 
ranges of graduating lancet arches filling every 
gable, and the continued repetition of the 
same simple forms even in the buttresses and 
string courses, and corbel tables, and the ex- 
treme harsh angular simplicity of the moldings 
all are developments of one idea. . . . And then 
from the centre of all this, that glorious spire 
rises, ending in the Cross. . . . Oh! that cathedral 
is an emblem, unconscious to its builders, of the 
whole history of Popery from the twelfth 

76 " 



BEMERTON 

century to the days when Luther preached 
once more Christ crucified for us — forever above 
us, yet forever among us! It has one peculiar 
beauty. It rises sheer out of a smooth and 
large grassfield, not struggling up among chim- 
neys and party-walls, but with the grass growing 
to the foot of the plinth. . . . The repose is so 
wonderful. It awes you, too, without crushing 
you. You can be cheerful under its shadow, 
but you could not do a base thing." 

No view of this glorious cathedral and its 
cross-tipped spire is finer than that which one 
has from the alder-lined banks of the Nadder 
here in Herbert's garden. There is a story 
told of Norris, the philosopher — he was the 
first critic of Locke's "Essay" — poet — his verses 
are for the most part ordinary and common- 
place — and preacher — the last twenty years of 
his life (he died in 1711) were lived at Bemerton 
— to the effect that his attention was called 
by a friend to the rare loveliness of the pros- 
pect as they stood side by side one summer 
evening near the edge of the stream. It seems 
that the poet's last chance of promotion had 
vanished with the appointment of Gilbert 
Burnet, the brilliant historian and contro- 
versialist, but extremely unpopular with the 
clergy (Swift said of him, "He has the misfortune 

77 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

to be hated by every one who either wears the 
habit or values the profession of a clergy- 
man"), to be Bishop of Salisbury. "Alas!" said 
Norris, looking mournfully at the distant cathe- 
dral, "it is my only prospect." But what a 
view across the meadows of that most graceful 
and symmetrical of English cathedrals! No- 
where can that richly adorned spire, the loftiest 
in England, which dominates all views of the 
city, be seen to better advantage than from 
this Bemerton garden. And to this quiet re- 
treat reaches also the music of the cathedral 
bells. The sometimes lonely parson found joy 
and companionship in this. He was a lover of 
sound. His recreation was music ; he played the 
lute, was fond of the organ, and sang. Professor 
Palmer has directed attention to the great 
refinement of Herbert's senses and particularly 
his susceptibility to odors. "Out of an odor he 
has constructed one of his daintiest poems. His 
'Banquet' is perfumed throughout. In ten other 
poems fragrances are mentioned. " How he must 
have reveled in the flowers of his garden ! 

"The kiss of the sun for pardon, 

The song of the birds for mirth — 
One is nearer God's heart in a garden 
Than any where else on earth." 

This Bemerton garden is much the same now 

78 




THE PRIVATE RIVER OF THE BEMERTON GARDEN 




SALISBURY CATHEDRAL ACROSS THE MEADOWS 



BEMERTON 

as it was when Herbert walked amid his flowers, 
softly singing his own beautiful hymn: 

"The God of love my shepherd is, 

And he that doth me feed, 

While he is mine, and I am his, 

What can I want or need? 

"He leads me to the tender grasse. 
Where I both feed and rest; 
Then to the streams that gently passe: 
In both I have the best." 

A medlar tree which he planted is still stand- 
ing, though much shattered by storms. The 
lawn, which slopes down to the river, is tapes- 
tried as we cross it, with the shadows of red 
chestnuts, giant elms, and venerable ash trees, 
but these walks and grounds have undergone 
changes since Herbert's day. And even now as 
we walk in the garden, changes are going on. 
The rector is at work in a small rock garden 
over there on the edge of the lawn. His 
"Mistress Jane" of Herbert's time is with him, 
and a well-groomed curate is lending his aid 
also. New plants are being set out. To-morrow 
there will be new blossoms. What if a thou- 
sand blooms shed their fragrance to bless this 
day, there will be yet more to-morrow! The 
Garden of the Lord grows more beautiful each 
passing day. The Kingdom of Heaven comes in 
all the earth, and the hearts of men are glad. 

79 



MADELEY 

Among the treasures of my library — and I 
have among others a number of ''association 
books" which lure me to a favorite shelf now 
and again — is a copy of Southey's "Life of 
Wesley," which once belonged to Edward Fitz- 
Gerald, the poet, bearing his autograph to- 
gether with many annotations and references. 
Among the latter are several to "Fletcher of 
Madeley," which, with various notes and char- 
acteristic markings of the account of the life 
and death of Fletcher, show FitzGerald's interest 
in this eminent eighteenth-century saint. He 
indicates his approval of Southey's well-known 
estimate: "Jean Guillaume de la Flechere was 
a man of rare talents and rarer virtue. No 
age or country has ever produced a man of 
more fervent piety or more perfect charity; 
no church has ever possessed a more apostolic 
minister. He was a man of whom Methodism 
may well be proud, as the most able of its 
defenders; and whom the Church of England 
may hold in remembrance as one of the most 
pious and excellent of her sons" — a remarkable 
tribute, but not more remarkable than Robert 

80 



MADELEY 

Hall's: "Fletcher is a seraph who burns with 
the ardor of divine love. Spurning the fetters 
of mortality, he almost habitually seems to 
have anticipated the rapture of the beatific 
vision"; or than John Wesley's encomium in 
the sermon which he preached on the death 
of his friend and coworker in 1785: "Many 
exemplary men have I known, holy in heart 
and life, within fourscore years; but one equal 
to him I have not known — one so inwardly 
and outwardly devoted to God. So unblam- 
able a character in every respect I have not 
found either in Europe or America; and I 
scarce expect to find another such on this side 
eternity." Now all this sounds like extrav- 
agant praise, but modern writers are no less 
profuse. "If John Wesley was the great leader 
and organizer," writes a Church of England 
historian, "Charles Wesley the great poet, and 
George Whitefield the great preacher of Method- 
ism, the highest type of saintliness which it 
produced was unquestionably John Fletcher. 
Never, perhaps, since the rise of Christianity 
has the mind which was in Christ Jesus been 
more faithfully copied than it was in the 
Vicar of Madeley. To say that he was a 
good Christian is saying too little. He was 
more than Christian; he was Christ-like!" 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

This remarkable man, although an English 
parish priest, was not an Englishman. He was 
born in Nyon, Switzerland, some fifteen miles 
from John Calvin's city, Geneva, the cradle 
of the Reformation. Fletcher never talked 
much of his ancestry, nor of the fine old baro- 
nial hall above Lake Leman, in which his 
father, at one time an officer in the French 
army, lived. Shortly after Fletcher's marriage 
his wife found in his desk a seal. "Is this 
yours?" she asked, not knowing that the 
simple country preacher was a descendant of 
one of the Savoy earldoms. "Yes," replied the 
good man, "but I have not used it for many 
years." "Why?" "Because it bears a coronet, 
nearly such as is the insignia of your English 
dukes. Were I to use that seal, it might lead 
to frivolous inquiries about my family, and 
subject me to the censure of valuing myself 
on such distinctions." More was it to him 
that he was a child of God than that the 
blood of earls flowed in his veins. A rich 
experience of grace in Christ Jesus, how cer- 
tainly it will give one a just sense of values! 

Fletcher's boyhood was spent in a beautiful 
home, superbly situated. "The house where I 
was born," he wrote, "has one of the finest 
prospects in the world. We have a shady 

82 



MADELEY 

wood, near the lake, where I can ride in the 
cool all day, and enjoy the singing of a mul- 
titude of birds." Who that has seen that 
wonderful view of Lake Leman with the Jura 
Mountains in the distance will ever forget it? 
At one's feet are vine-covered terraces reaching 
down to the blue lake 

"with its crystal face, 
The mirror where the stars and mountains view 
The stillness of their aspect in each trace"; 

there is a boat on the quiet waters, whose 
"sail is as a noiseless wing"; to the right is the 
stern city of Geneva, to the left are Lausanne, 
Clarens, "sweet Clarens, the birthplace of deep 
Love," and the much-sung Castle of Chillon, 
and beyond and above are the mountains, and 
over all an Italian sky! Upon such a scene 
as this Fletcher looked during his boyhood. 

Some, like Samuel, are called early to God's 
altars. John Fletcher was, but his instinctive 
timidity turned him from "so great a burden," 
and he entered the army, or made the attempt, 
rather. The story of the thwarting of his 
purpose is classic. Portugal was sending troops 
to Brazil to defend its interests there, and 
Fletcher went to Lisbon, where he gathered 
a company of his own countrymen, accepted 
a captain's commission, and was waiting for 

83 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the ship to sail, when one day the maid who 
was attending him at breakfast let fall a kettle 
of water, which so severely scalded the young 
soldier that before he recovered, the vessel 
had sailed for Brazil, and, as Wesley observed, 
"the ship was heard of no more." God seem- 
ingly had other plans for him. 

Oliver Goldsmith went to Holland once to 
teach the Dutch English, without himself know- 
ing a word of Dutch. Fletcher, speaking only 
French, came to England in 1752 for the sole 
purpose of learning the language, and in an 
incredibly brief period he had acquired such 
skill in its use that he obtained a position in 
a family of influence, living at Tern Hall in 
Shropshire, the head of which was later to 
place this Swiss tutor in the parish which 
was to be the scene of his life work. It was 
all very strange. God does move in a mys- 
terious way! 

The England into which Fletcher came to 
learn English was itself learning something 
else, being at that time in the very midst of 
that remarkable evangelical revival which was 
destined in the providence of God to kindle 
fresh altar fires all over the land. For nearly 
twenty years now George Whitefield, as elo- 
quent a preacher as England heard in the 

84 




LAKE LEMAN AND THE CASTLE OF CHILLON 




A SHROPSHIRE COTTAGE 



MADELEY 

eighteenth century, had been going about the 
country, gathering immense crowds, and mov- 
ing men to repentance; John Wesley had long 
since entered upon that unparalleled itinerant 
career which was to take him to every town 
and hamlet in England ; and such other ' 'evan- 
gelicals" as Grimshaw, and Romaine, and Row- 
land, and Hervey were producing really extraor- 
dinary effects by their open-air preaching. 

There is a story that Fletcher's earliest 
acquaintance with the Methodists came about 
in this wise. Indeed, he himself related it to 
Wesley in the following words: ''When Mr. 
Hill went to London to attend the Parliament 
he took his family and me with him. On one 
occasion, while they stopped at Saint Albans, 
I walked out into the town, and did not return 
until they were set out for London. A horse 
being left for me, I rode after them and over- 
took them in the evening. Mr. Hill asked me 
why I stayed behind. I said, 'As I was walk- 
ing I met with a poor old woman, who talked 
so sweetly of Jesus Christ that I knew not 
how the time passed away.' Said Mrs. Hill, 
'I shall wonder if our tutor doesn't turn Meth- 
odist by and by.' 'Methodist?' said I. 'Pray 
what is that?' She replied, 'Why, the Meth- 
odists are a people that do nothing but pray. 

85 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

They are praying all day and all night.' 'Are 
they?' said I. 'Then, by the help of God, I will 
find them out if they be above ground.' I 
did find them out not long after, and was 
admitted into the society." Tyerman thinks 
that the date was surely not later than 1756, 
and probably a year or two earlier. Be that 
as it may, Fletcher had at last yielded to his 
early call to preach, and shortly after received 
the divine anointing for the work of the minis- 
try. His own account of the solemn event 
reveals in large measure the secret of his pas- 
sion for and success in the salvation of souls. 
"About the time of my entering into the minis- 
try," he says, "I one evening wandered into a 
wood, musing on the importance of the office I 
was going to undertake. I then began to pour 
out my soul in prayer, when such a feeling sense 
of the justice of God fell upon me, and such a 
discovery of his displeasure at sin, as absorbed 
all my powers, and filled my soul with an agony 
of prayer for poor, lost sinners. I continued 
there till the dawn of day, and I considered this 
as designed of God to impress upon me more 
deeply the manner of those solemn words, 
'Therefore knowing the terrors of the Lord, we 
persuade men.'" He was ordained in 1757, 
receiving deacon's orders from the Bishop of 

86 



MADELEY 

Hereford, and priest's orders on the following 
Sunday from the Bishop of Bangor, in the 
Chapel Royal at Saint James, London. On the 
day that he was ordained priest he went to 
Snowfield to assist Wesley in a sacramental 
service. It was a far cry from that royal 
chapel to Snowfield! But henceforth Fletcher 
was to have close relations both with the 
Church of England and with the Methodist 
movement, as so many clergymen did in that 
wonderful spiritual awakening. Fletcher speed- 
ily became a great favorite with the Wesleys, 
and between him and Charles Wesley there 
grew up a beautiful friendship, which con- 
tinued until Fletcher's untimely death. 

Fletcher's choice of Madeley rather than a 
much more desirable living was characteristic 
of the man. The story has been told many 
times, but it will bear repeating to every 
generation. He remained with the Hills at 
Tern Hall, until the two sons of the family had 
become undergraduates at Cambridge. Mean- 
while he had preached as occasion offered, 
now at Atcham, some five miles from Tern 
Hall, where the text was so direct, and 
his sermon so plain, that the rebuked congre- 
gation did not soon care to hear him again, 
and now in a village chapel in another direc- 

87 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

tion. Now he preaches in French, and now 
in English. His patron knew his burning 
desire to preach and one day offered him the 
living of Dunham. It had never occurred to 
him that it would not prove an acceptable 
gift. 

"The parish," said he, "is small, the duty 
light, and the income good — four hundred 
pounds per annum, and it is situated in a 
fine, healthy, sporting country." But Fletcher 
was not looking for this kind of an opening. 

"Alas!" he replied, "alas, sir, Dunham will 
not suit me. There is too much money and 
too little labor." 

"But," said his benefactor, "few clergymen 
make such objections. Is it not a pity to 
decline such a living, especially as I know not 
where I can find you another? Would you 
like Madeley?" 

"That, sir," said the zealous young preacher, 
"would be the very place for me." 

And so the matter was arranged, and Fletcher 
had no occasion to be dissatisfied either with 
the amount of the work, or with the size of 
the income, the former being abundant, and 
the latter amounting to barely twenty-five 
pounds per year. Thus, October 17, 1760, 
John Fletcher became vicar of Madeley, a 

88 



MADELEY 

relationship which was to continue until his 
death, twenty-five years later, August 14, 1785. 
Madeley is in Shropshire, in the west of 
England, near Wales, a journey of nearly 
three days by coach from London. To one 
who proposed to visit him, Fletcher sent these 
directions, much as Thackeray might have 
written to a friend: "If you choose to venture 
into Shropshire, you may take the Shrewsbury 
coach at the Swan, in Lad Lane, somewhere 
in the city, and in two days and a half you 
will be at Shiffnal, eighteen miles short of 
Shrewsbury, and three from Madeley. If you 
send me word when you are to set out, I will 
send my mare to meet you at the Red Lion, 
in Shiffnal, the day that the coach passes 
through the town." And whoever made the 
journey found a town beautifully situated in 
a winding glen through which flows the Severn 
River. The church was not an attractive one 
— it was long ago demolished and the one 
now standing built. The parish included Coal- 
brookdale and Madeley Wood, noted for their 
coal mines and their iron works. Aside from 
these, Madeley seems to have been remarkable 
in Fletcher's day for little else than the ignor- 
ance and profaneness of its inhabitants. It 
was surely a benighted place to which he came, 

89 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

though the situation there was no worse than 
elsewhere in England. Appalling indeed were 
the conditions of rural and urban life in Eng- 
land in the eighteenth century! In Madeley as 
everywhere the external forms of religion had 
long been held up to ridicule. The people 
almost never went to church. The ordinary 
congregation was discouragingly small, and, 
what was worse, nobody seemed to care. No 
modern pastor has been confronted by a more 
difficult task, or has found more "problems" 
clamoring for solution. The most of the people 
were "stupid heathens," many of them were 
wantonly immoral, even. It was a common 
thing in that parish, he soon discovered, for 
young persons of both sexes to meet together 
for what was called "recreation," which rec- 
reation generally continued from evening to 
morning, and consisted chiefly of dancing, 
reveling, drunkenness, and obscenity. Imme- 
diately, like John the Baptist, he laid the ax 
at the root of the tree. Time and again he 
burst in upon them, his eyes aflame, and his 
indignation breaking all bounds. He made con- 
stant war on the saloon and other foes of 
goodness. Yet he was the gentlest of men, 
and from the very start of his ministry at 
Madeley he sought to be a good shepherd. 

90 




COALBROOKDALE 




OLD COURT HOUSE, MADELEY 



MADELEY 

He was not content merely to discharge the 
stated duties of the Sabbath as others before 
him had been. In return for the "living of 
Madeley" he gave a life to the people. He 
sought them out. He went "into their pits 
and forges." He put on the dress of a miner, 
and was lowered into the mines where he 
worked with the men and exhorted them with 
tears. He visited from house to house six, 
eight, ten hours a day. Those alarmed sinners 
who tried to hide from him he pursued to every 
corner of his parish. When some gave as an 
excuse for not attending church that they 
could not awake early enough to get their 
families ready, taking a bell in hand, he went 
through the streets and lanes and even to 
the outlying parts of the parish, starting as 
early as five in the morning, to summon all 
the people to the house of God. His pastoral 
labors were incessant. Early and late, without 
regard to weather, now on horseback, and 
now on foot, he went his daily rounds. He 
ate little, seldom taking any regular meal 
except when he had company, and when re- 
proved for not allowing himself a sufficiency 
of necessary food, he replied, "Not allow my- 
self food? Why, our food seldom costs my 
housekeeper and me less than two shillings 

9i 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

a week!" The emphasis which the "evan- 
gelicals" put upon pastoral oversight has been 
overlooked. It is commonly thought that 
Methodism was merely a revival, and an 
awakening it surely was, but the leaders gave 
unusual attention to the care of converts. The 
first work of the Holy Club was pastoral in its 
nature. The members visited the poor, the 
sick, the prisoner. 

Fletcher's appreciation of the value of time 
was such as any man will have who feels the 
urgency of the King's business. To some 
schoolgirls who came on his invitation to the 
vicarage in the early morning of the day fol- 
lowing a visit by him to the school, he gave 
an impressive lesson. When they were seated 
in the kitchen he took a basin of milk and 
some bread and seating himself on an old 
bench, said as he laid his watch near him, 
"Girls, yesterday morning I waited on you a 
full hour, while you were at breakfast. Look 
at my watch!" He then began to eat, con- 
tinuing in conversation with them. When he 
had finished, he asked them how long he had 
been. "Just a minute and a half, sir," one 
of them answered. "Now, girls," he replied, 
"we have fifty-eight minutes of the hour left." 
And then he began to sing, 

92 



MADELEY 

"Our life is a dream! 
Our time as a stream 
Glides swiftly away, 
And the fugitive moment refuses to stay." 

After which he talked with them on the value 
of time, and the worth of the soul, and prayed 
with and for them, and gave them his blessing. 
Naturally opposition arose, and it was of a 
sort to test his faith and his patience. His 
preaching was too direct; his pastoral labors 
were too personal; the questions which he 
asked were too troublesome; the course which 
he marked out was too straight. Soon the 
parish was in a turmoil. A clergyman living 
in Madeley, a very proper young man, openly 
declared war upon him by pasting on his 
church door a paper in which he charged him 
with rebellion, schism, and with being a dis- 
turber of the public peace. The owners of 
the public houses raged against him. Some of 
the leading farmers and most of the respectable 
tradesmen wanted to turn him out of his 
living. Others called him a Jesuit, and still 
others used more obnoxious terms. The oppo- 
sition grew so violent that Fletcher was sorely 
tempted to give up his living. He wrote his 
friend Charles Wesley that he had lost what 
little reputation he had had. Nevertheless he 

93 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

continued his labors and added to them. To 
his Friday night lecture, which was an innova- 
tion — and what parish will not resist innovations 
or changes to the death? — he added the cate- 
chizing of children on Sunday afternoon, an- 
other startling departure. He opened services 
at Madeley Wood and Coalbrookdale — more ir- 
regularities. Yet soon his preaching and his work 
began to attract much attention. Not only 
was his church filled, but scores who could not 
find room in the church stood in the church- 
yard, and listened to his impassioned appeals. 

There are numerous incidents of Fletcher's 
early ministry at Madeley which are historic, 
among them a remarkable occurrence which 
belongs to the year 1763, barely three years 
after his coming to Madeley. It attracted 
unusual attention at the time and has since. 
Among other modern writers, Stanley in his 
"Lectures on the Jewish Church" refers to it. 
On September 29, of that year, the Feast 
of Saint Michael, to whom the church at Madeley 
was dedicated, Fletcher preached a sermon 
which had an amazing outcome. The story of 
it was afterward published in a small tract 
entitled "The Furious Butcher Humbled," the 
substance of which shall be given in the words 
of the preacher himself. "One Sunday when I 

94 



MADELEY 

had done reading prayers at Madeley," he re- 
lates, "I went up into the pulpit, intending to 
preach a sermon, which I had prepared for 
that purpose; but my mind was so confused, 
that I could not recollect either my text or 
any part of my sermon. I was afraid I should 
be obliged to come down without saying any- 
thing. But, having recollected myself a little, 
I thought I would say something on the First 
Lesson, which was the third chapter of the 
book of Daniel, containing the account of 
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, being cast 
into the fiery furnace. I found in doing this 
such extraordinary assistance from God, and 
such a peculiar enlargement of heart, that I 
supposed there must be some peculiar cause for 
it. I therefore desired, if any of the congre- 
gation found anything particular, they would 
acquaint me with it in the ensuing week. In 
consequence of this the Wednesday after a 
woman came and gave me the following account : 
'I have been for some time much concerned 
about my soul. I have attended the church 
at all opportunities, and have spent much 
time in private prayer. At this, my husband 
(who is a butcher) has been exceedingly en- 
raged, and has threatened me severely as to 
what he would do to me if I did not leave 

95 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

off going to John Fletcher's church, yea, if I 
dared to go again to any religious meetings 
whatever. When I told him that I could not 
in conscience refrain from going, at least to 
the parish church, he became outrageous, and 
swore dreadfully, and said if I went again, 
he would cut my throat as soon as I came 
back. This made me cry to God that he would 
support me; and, though I did not feel any 
great degree of comfort, yet, having a sure 
confidence in God, I determined to do my 
duty, and leave the event to him. Last Sunday, 
after many struggles with the devil and my 
own heart, I came downstairs ready for church. 
My husband said he should not cut my throat 
as he had intended, but he would heat the 
oven and throw me into it the moment I 
came home. Notwithstanding this threat, which 
he enforced with many bitter oaths, I went 
to church, praying all the way that God would 
strengthen me to suffer whatever might befall 
me. While you were speaking of the three 
children whom Nebuchadnezzar cast into the 
burning fiery furnace, I found all you said 
belonged to me. God applied every word to 
my heart; and, when the sermon was ended, 
I thought if I had a thousand lives, I could 
lay them all down for him. I felt so filled 

96 



MADELEY 

with his love that I hastened home, fully 
determined to give myself to whatsoever God 
pleased, nothing doubting that he either would 
take me to heaven if he suffered me to be 
burnt to death; or that he would in some way 
deliver me, as he did his three servants that 
trusted in him. When I got to my own door 
I saw flames issuing from the oven, and I 
expected to be thrown into it immediately. 
I felt my heart rejoice, that if it were so the 
will of the Lord would be done. I opened 
the door, and to my utter astonishment saw 
my husband upon his knees praying for the 
forgiveness of his sins. He caught me in his 
arms, earnestly begged my pardon, and has 
continued diligently seeking God ever since.' " 

The Lady, when I read this strange tale to 
her, remarked quietly and convincingly that 
with such preaching to-day she imagined there 
would be more men, and women, too, for that 
matter, attending church. I suspect she is 
right — as usual. 

Fletcher's relations to the "evangelicals" of 
the eighteenth century were very intimate. 
As I have said, the Wesleys were devoted to 
him. No man in England better understood 
John Wesley, not even his brother Charles, 
or more thoroughly sympathized with his mis- 

97 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

sion than, John Fletcher; and in the society 
of no man of his age did Wesley have greater 
delight than with this best beloved of his 
preachers, the Saint John of Methodism, and 
of no other did Wesley entertain a higher 
opinion as to his gifts and graces. "Such a 
burning and shining light," he said, "instead 
of being confined to a country village ought 
to shine in every other corner of the land," 
and Wesley used all his arts of persuasion to 
draw him far afield, but it may well be doubted, 
as we shall see in a moment, whether Fletcher, 
if he had become an itinerant evangelist, as 
Wesley desired, could have rendered the in- 
valuable service to Methodism which he did 
render a little later. Wesley visited Madeley, 
which he designates "an exceeding pleasant 
village, encompassed with trees and hills," and 
urged him to accompany him on a preaching 
tour, which Fletcher did now and again, but 
he would soon find his way back to his country 
parish. So great was Wesley's regard for him 
that he selected him for his successor, and in 
January, 1773, wrote to him a memorable 
letter in which he makes known his choice of 
the man upon whom his mantle shall fall. In 
this letter he speaks of the amazing work 
which God had wrought in Great Britain in 

98 




FLETCHERS PULPIT AND BIBLE 




MADELEY CHURCH 



MADELEY 

less than forty years, and how it was spread-- 
ing in America. He states, though, that people 
are saying that "when Mr. Wesley dies, all 
this will come to naught," which he says "may 
happen unless a competent successor is found." 
He then describes the kind of a man his suc- 
cessor ought to be. "He must be a man of 
faith and love, and one that has a single eye 
to the advancement of the kingdom of God. 
He must have a clear understanding, a knowl- 
edge of men and things, particularly of the 
Methodist doctrine and discipline, a ready 
utterance, diligence and activity, with a toler- 
able share of health. There must be added 
favor with the people, with the Methodists 
in general. For, unless God turn their eyes 
and their hearts toward him, he will be quite 
incapable of the work. He must likewise have 
some degree of learning, because there are 
many adversaries, learned as well as unlearned, 
whose mouths must be stopped. But this can- 
not be done unless he be able to meet them 
on their own ground. But has God provided 
one so qualified? Who is he? Thou art the 
man!" He then goes on to tell Fletcher that 
he has the gifts, the knowledge of Methodism, 
as well as of men and things, experience, and 
piety for the task, meets any objections which 

99 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

he may urge, and concludes, "without con- 
ferring, therefore, with flesh or blood, come and 
strengthen the hands, comfort the heart, share 
the labor of your affectionate friend and brother, 
John Wesley." This letter is in every respect 
a remarkable one, and indicates as nothing else 
could Wesley's judgment of the Vicar of Made- 
ley. To have been chosen from among all of 
Wesley's preachers as the one preeminently 
qualified to carry forward the stupendous work 
of that ecclesiastical genius of the eighteenth 
century was no small distinction. But in the 
providence of God, Wesley lived to preach his 
"designated successor's" funeral sermon. 

Fletcher early made the acquaintance of the 
more conspicuous leaders of the Methodist 
movement, and Madeley became a sort of 
Mecca to which many of them made religious 
pilgrimages. Hither, accompanied by Lady 
Anne Erskine, came the Countess of Hunt- 
ingdon in 1767, for a memorable visit. Wesley 
had introduced him to this gracious woman in 
1758, which was the beginning of a rare friend- 
ship, clouded for a season, it is true, by the 
unfortunate controversies concerning doctrines, 
which divided the evangelical house against 
itself, but beautiful even in the midst of storm. 

Shortly after meeting Fletcher, the Countess 
100 



MADELEY 

of Huntingdon — "an humble and pious countess, 
a modern prodigy," as Fletcher styled her in 
a letter to Charles Wesley — requested him to 
become one of her domestic chaplains, and 
thereafter Fletcher preached frequently in her 
ladyship's drawing room. In his audiences 
there he had many distinguished hearers, such 
as Lady Anne Frankland, daughter of the Earl 
of Scarborough, one of the first fruits of White- 
field's ministry among the London nobility, 
and her sisters, Lady Barbara Leigh and Lady 
Henrietta Lumley; Lord Dartmouth, the founder 
of Dartmouth College; the Countess Delitz, 
Lord Bolingbroke, who "sat like an arch- 
bishop," one of the cleverest skeptics of the 
day; Lord Chesterfield, of whom Dr. Johnson 
once remarked that he was "a wit among 
lords, and a lord among wits"; the Duchess of 
Queensbury, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, 
whose beauty and vivacity were celebrated 
by Prior, Pope, and Swift; Lady Fanny Shirley, 
an aunt of the Countess Selina of Huntingdon, 
the friend of Pope and the rival of Lady Mary 
Wortley Montague, whose conversion Horace 
Walpole recounts in his gossiping letters, and 
many others. With all these he was a decided 
favorite, though unfortunately not all of them 
gave heed to his admonitions. 

IOI 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

When Lady Huntingdon opened her famous 
college at Trevecca, Wales, for the education of 
young men resolved to devote themselves to 
God's service, she sought the active cooperation 
of her friend and chaplain, John Fletcher, whom 
she induced to undertake the superintendency. 
Without fee or reward Fletcher filled this 
important position, continuing meanwhile his 
work at Madeley, until the controversial tem- 
pest broke, and it seemed best to resign. One 
of the early students of Trevecca College, if 
not the very first student, was a young pa- 
rishioner of Fletcher, a collier and iron-worker 
from Madeley Wood, who proved to be a 
preacher of decided ability. This was not 
Fletcher's only "son in the Gospel." Samuel 
Bradburn, a soldier's son, born at Gibraltar, 
brought to England when he was twelve, 
apprenticed to a shoemaker, converted, called 
to preach, set off for Madeley to see the re- 
nowned Fletcher, who with characteristic hos- 
pitality urged him to become his guest. To 
the end of his life Bradburn, who became a 
mighty preacher, unquestionably the greatest 
pulpit orator Wesley had in his company of 
preachers, thankfully acknowledged that he 
greatly owed his subsequent eminence to his 
Madeley visit. Adam Clarke, who knew him 

102 



MADELEY 

well, thought that he had never heard his 
equal, and long after Fletcher's death the 
eloquent voice of Bradburn was echoing through 
England, and in him as in others John Fletcher 
being dead, continued to speak. 

"Alike are life and death, 

When life in death survives; 
And the uninterrupted breath 
Inspires a thousand lives." 

One of the large services which the country- 
minister contributes to the advance of the 
kingdom of God is the turning of the steps 
of worthy young men in the direction of the 
schools and the pulpits of the Christian Church. 

To return to the Madeley visitors, hither 
came in 1784 Charles Simeon, then twenty-five 
years of age, full of zeal and of faith, and who 
when he came into the vicarage was greeted with 
fatherly affection by the fast-failing preacher. 
When Fletcher had secured the young man's 
assent to his request that he preach, he again 
went through the village as of old, bell in 
hand, calling the people to the sanctuary to 
hear "a young clergyman from Cambridge." 

Among the friends of the- Madeley vicar- — a 
circle as distinguished in its way as the group 
which revolved around Samuel Johnson — was 
Henry Venn, who saw Fletcher often, and who 

103 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

remarked with solemn emphasis to a brother 
clergyman after his friend's death: "Sir, Mr. 
Fletcher was a luminary — a luminary did I 
say? He was a sun! I have known all the 
great men for these fifty years, but I have 
known none like him. I was intimately ac- 
quainted with him, and was under the same 
roof with him once for six weeks, during which 
time I never heard him say a single word 
which was not proper to be spoken, and which 
had not a tendency to minister grace to the 
hearers." 

Fletcher made the personal acquaintance of 
Berridge early in his career. He had heard 
much of him, and desiring to see him made 
a journey to Everton in 1760. The account 
of this visit is well known. On arriving he 
introduced himself to Berridge "as a new 
convert, who had taken the liberty to wait 
upon him for the benefit of his instruction 
and advice." Berridge, perceiving he was a 
foreigner, asked what countryman he was. 

"A Swiss from the canton of Berne," was 
the reply. 

"From Berne! Then probably you can give 
me some account of a young countryman of 
yours, John Fletcher, who has lately preached 
a few times for the Messrs. Wesley, and of 

104 



MADELEY 

whose talents, learning, and piety they both 
speak in terms of highest eulogy. Do you 
know him?" 

"Yes, sir, I know him intimately; and did 
those gentlemen know him as well they would 
not speak so highly of him. He is more obliged 
to their partial friendship than to his own 
merits." 

"You surprise me," said Berridge. 

"I have the best reason for speaking of 
John Fletcher as I did. I am John Fletcher." 

"If you be John Fletcher," replied Berridge, 
"you must take my pulpit to-morrow." And 
it is more than likely that he did, for Berridge 
was not one to be denied. Later there was 
an estrangement occasioned by the controversy 
which alienated Lady Huntingdon and others 
from him, but which could not last long when 
between two such spiritually minded men. 

Perhaps this is as good a place as any other 
to say what must be said concerning that 
period of Fletcher's life at Madeley in which 
he was engaged in a spirited defense of Ar- 
minian teachings. The statement shall be as 
brief as possible, but no account of Madeley 
or its famous preacher would be complete 
without some account of that "unhappy con- 
troversy," in which the doughty champion of 

105 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the doctrine of free will and the like played 
such a conspicuous part. At the Methodist 
Conference of 1770 it was felt that there had 
been "leaning too much toward Calvinism," 
and the fact was so stated. This fear was ever 
before them. They had said the same thing 
as far back as 1744. Now the conflict be- 
came general and painfully bitter. Few of 
those who were engaged in it came out of the 
fray creditably. Lady Huntingdon intimated 
that if there were instructors or students in 
her college at Trevecca, Wales, who sided 
with Wesley, there was no room for them. 
Benson was dismissed, and Fletcher resigned. 
There was a world of trouble. Meanwhile in 
the quiet country parish in Salop, Fletcher was 
writing his famous "Checks to Antinomianism. " 
He vanquished Shirley and Sir Richard Hill. 
Then Rowland Hill came into the field, and 
Fletcher took his measure. Southey, in the 
"Book of Authors," says of this war of words, 
that the most conspicuous writers on the 
part of the Calvinists were Richard and Row- 
land Hill and Augustus Montague Toplady, and 
adds: "Never were any writings more thor- 
oughly saturated with the essential acid of 
Calvinism than those of the predestinarian 
champions. It would scarcely be credible that 

106 






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MANUSCRIPT SERMON OF FLETCHER'S 



MADELEY 

three persons of good birth and education, 
and of unquestionable goodness and piety, 
should have carried on controversy in so vile 
a manner and with so detestable a spirit, if 
the hatred of the theologians had not un- 
happily become so proverbial." But little can 
be said for the other side, either. It was a 
war of epithets. That Hill was caustic and 
severe, there can be no question. Hill himself 
admits that his language was sharp, but 
excuses his severity by quoting some of the 
epithets applied by the Wesleys and others to 
the Calvinists, such as, for example, "devil- 
factors," "advocates for sin," "Satan's syna- 
gogue," "witnessing for the father of lies," 
"blasphemers," "Satan-sent preachers," "liars," 
"fiends." They certainly did not mince mat- 
ters. Black was black, and no mistake. But 
at the distance of a hundred years and more, 
all this seems rather mild and commonplace, 
yet when the conflict of words was being 
waged it was wormwood and gall. This, how- 
ever, must be said concerning Fletcher's part 
in it, he does not seem to have shown the 
same bitterness of spirit as^some of the other 
writers. Of all the controversialists he came 
out with the least injury to his reputation. 
"If ever true Christian charity was manifested 

107 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

in polemical writing," if I may quote Southey 
once more, "it was by Fletcher of Madeley." 
And Overton says, "Fletcher wrote like a 
scholar and like a gentleman, and what is 
better than either, like a Christian." Fletcher 
did not like the controversy. It was to him 
an unspeakable sorrow. "I long to be out of 
controversy," he wrote. He was not in any 
sense a party man. He desired merely to do 
his duty, and he did it well, for whatever may 
be thought of the famous theological war, this 
country minister did for Methodist theology 
what no one else at that time could have 
done. He had a remarkable knowledge of 
Scripture, and a gift of expression which 
enabled him to state Methodist doctrines as 
no other writer. It is agreed by all historians 
that John Wesley traveled, preached, formed 
societies, and governed them; that Charles 
Wesley wrote hymns for the converts to sing; 
and that Fletcher explained, elaborated, and 
defended the doctrines they believed. Wesley, 
in his itinerant travels, could not command the 
time to give to such a task; but Fletcher almost 
literally for six years shut himself up in Made- 
ley that he might have time to write. Every- 
thing had to give way to this great purpose. 
Everything ? Yes, everything — except his pastoral 

108 



MADELEY 

duties, and with these nothing was ever allowed to 
interfere. How like Chaucer's parish priest, who 

"This noble ensample to his sheep he gave 

That first he wrought and afterward he taught." 

Fletcher's devotion to the people of Madeley 
was complete. He lived for them and for 
their children. Their concern was his concern. 
Their spiritual development was always upper- 
most in his mind. He was among the first to 
see the value of the Sunday school, which had 
been started by Robert Raikes in 1780 at 
Gloucester. He undoubtedly knew of Raikes 's 
new enterprise, and he was even more familiar 
with the work of Hannah More, "one of the 
most brilliant female ornaments of Christian 
literature," who had turned from her literary 
friends, Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
and a host of others, in London, after the death 
of Garrick in 1779, to live a life of quietness 
and goodness in a small village near Bristol, 
and who, moved by the shocking condition 
of the villagers, gave herself "to the poor and 
to those that have no helper," opening first 
one school, and then another. Fletcher almost 
immediately opened six schools in his parish, 
and the results were surprisingly good, not 
alone among the children, but also among adults. 

109 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

His love of children was always great. There 
is no more beautiful passage in the hundreds 
of letters which he wrote than is to be found 
in a letter written from Nyon, while on a 
visit there in 1778, in which he tells of meet- 
ing "some children in my wood gathering 
strawberries." "I spoke to them about our 
common Father. We felt a touch of brotherly 
affection. They said they would sing to their 
Father, as well as the birds; and followed me, 
attempting to make such melody as you know 
is commonly made in these parts. I outrode 
them, but some of them had the patience to 
follow me home; and said they would speak 
with me. The people of the house stopped 
them, saying I would not be troubled with 
children. They cried, and said they were sure 
I would not say so, for I was their good brother. 
The next day, when I heard this, I inquired after 
them, and invited them to come and see me; 
which they have done every day since. I make 
them little hymns which they sing." Could any- 
thing be more exquisitely beautiful than this ! 

This visit to Nyon was not the first which 
he had made since his departure for England. 
It was in 1770 that he first returned. He 
went to Marseilles, then made a visit to the 
Protestants in the Cevennes Mountains, and 

no 



MADELEY 

finally set out for Italy. When in Rome he 
drove out to the Appian Way. As they ap- 
proached it, Fletcher left the carriage, for, as he 
remarked, "I cannot ride over ground where 
the Apostle Paul once walked, chained to a 
soldier." As soon as he set his foot upon the 
old Roman road, he took off his hat, and, 
walking on with his eyes lifted up to heaven, 
he gave God thanks for the glorious truths 
which Paul preached. Arriving in Switzerland 
he was at once urged by the clergymen at 
Nyon to occupy their pulpits. There were not 
a few converts as the result. When the time 
had come for him to return to England, a 
good minister, of more than threescore years 
and ten, begged him with much earnestness, to 
remain a little longer, even if only for a single 
week; and when this was found to be im- 
possible, the disappointed man burst into tears 
with the exclamation, "How unfortunate for 
my country! During my lifetime, it has pro- 
duced but one angel of a man, and now it is 
our lot to lose him!" 

Country preachers are not of necessity pro- 
vincial. A man of the broadest culture and 
sympathies, Fletcher was interested in the 
affairs of the nation as well as the daily round 
of parish duties. In an unpublished letter, 

in 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

dated Newcastle, May 21, 1776, Joseph Benson, 
speaking of the perilous times in England, says, 
"You see what a famous politician our friend 
Fletcher is become." I doubt, though, if it 
may be said that Fletcher turned politician. 
But like Wesley, Fletcher, although foreign born, 
was desirous of showing himself a loyal British 
subject, and wrote two pamphlets that year of 
the signing of the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendence, defending the government's course 
and contention with regard to the American 
colonies. These publications, which showed 
both literary skill and an unusual knowledge 
of English politics, consisted of letters addressed 
to writers who argued in favor of the colonists. 
It is generally felt that this lending of his 
pen for political discussion was an error of 
judgment, one of the few mistakes which the 
good man made. His motives were pure, but 
even pure motives will not always atone for 
mistakes. He should have let George III and 
his ministers fight their own battles. Fletcher 
was a man of peace, not of war. Nevertheless, the 
king, to whom one of the pamphlets was shown 
by the Lord Chancellor, was so well pleased 
with Fletcher's statement of the case, that he 
sent a messenger to him to inquire if ecclesias- 
tical preferment would be acceptable to him, 

112 




CHANCEL FLETCHER S CHURCH 




APPIAN WAY 



MADELEY 

or if there was any other way he could serve 
him. But Fletcher had written from a stern 
sense of duty and not with the view of advanc- 
ing his personal interests. "I want nothing but 
more grace," was his reply. 

I have in my library another rare book, 
which is more like Fletcher than either his 
"Vindication of John Wesley's Calm Address," 
or his "Tract on American Patriotism." It is 
a copy of his "An Essay upon the Peace of 
1783," translated from the French by the 
Rev. J. Gilpin, a presentation copy from the 
translator, with numerous rewritings of the 
translation in the translator's handwriting. 
The dedication is to the "honored Mrs. Mary 
De la Flechere, of Madeley in Shropshire." 
This was among the last of the writings of 
Fletcher, not published until after his death. 
It seems very fitting that one whose life had 
been given to the proclamation of the gospel 
of peace, should have written an apotheosis 
of peace at the very end of his life, the closing 
words of which are : 

"Messiah reigns! by every Tongue confess' d, 
Triumphant Lord of all, for ever bless'd! 
Let Heaven's bright Host, in one grand Chorus join'd, 
With all the mingling Tribes of Humankind, 
Peace upon Earth, in endless Transports sing, 
And Glory to our Everlasting King." 

11 3 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Unlike Beecher, who once replied to an inquiry 
as to his health that he had more of it than 
he knew what to do with, Fletcher for years 
had great "bodily weakness," and at times 
his condition was such as to awaken the gravest 
fears. Never rugged, of a delicate constitution, 
living ascetically, taking no exercise, toiling 
unceasingly, he developed pulmonary consump- 
tion, and as it seemed improbable that he 
could live much longer in England, he went 
to the south of France in 1777, and later to 
his native place, where he sought medical 
advice, and was tenderly cared for by loving 
friends and relatives. It is noteworthy that 
one of his first acts there, sick and weak as 
he was, was to write a letter "to the Societies 
in and about Madeley," addressing the people 
of that beautiful region as "my dear, very 
dear brethren." Letter followed letter, all 
breathing his concern for them and exhorting 
them to "continue steadfast in faith, patience, 
and love." Whenever he was away from 
Madeley, if only for a short time, he dispatched 
a letter to his flock, and his numerous pastoral 
letters are among the best of his many letters. 
For some time after his arrival in Switzerland 
he lived in the fine old house in which he was 
born, with its commanding view of Lake 

114 



MADELEY 

Leman , with Geneva in the distance, and tower- 
ing over all, some fifty miles away, Mont 
Blanc, monarch of mountains. Gradually his 
strength returned, and he preached occasionally, 
and then he grew impatient to be in England 
once more. He reached Madeley in May, 1781, 
after an absence from his people of four and 
a half years, during which he had only par- 
tially regained his health, but had done some 
of his most important literary work, such as 
his poem in French, published in Geneva with 
the title "La Louange," an extended para- 
phrase of Psalm 148, and his "The Portrait of 
Saint Paul, or, The True Model for Christians 
and Pastors," which was not published, how- 
ever, until after his death, and now is little 
read, but which every modern minister might 
peruse with profit. He took up his parish 
work with the old zeal, resumed the old crusade 
against the public houses with greater success, 
opened Sunday schools in various neighbor- 
hoods, preached with increased power — and de- 
cided to marry ! He was now fifty-two years of 
age, and the woman to whom he made the offer 
of marriage was ten years his junior, having been 
born in 1739. Mary Bosanquet had been led 
into the light, like Catherine Livingstone, who 
married Freeborn Garrettson, one of Amer- 

"5 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

ican Methodism's conspicuous preachers, by a 
servant. Later coming into possession of "a 
small fortune," she dedicated it and herself to 
good works, and for many years was known 
as one of the elect women of the evangelical 
movement. Lady Huntingdon knew her and 
esteemed her highly. John Wesley said that 
she was the only person in all England worthy 
of Mr. Fletcher, but then poor Wesley wasn't 
much of an authority on women, certainly not 
a judge of wives. They had long admired each 
other, but when they first became acquainted 
Fletcher regarded Miss Bosanquet's fortune as 
an insuperable barrier to their union; and Miss 
Bosanquet was too much occupied with her 
philanthropic schemes to think of being mar- 
ried. Their marriage proved a singularly happy 
one. On January 6, 1782, they spent their first 
Sunday at Madeley. Seventeen years after- 
ward, Mrs. Fletcher wrote: "The first Sabbath 
after I came to Madeley my dear husband 
took me into the kitchen, where his people 
were assembled to partake of refreshment be- 
tween the times of worship. He introduced me 
to them saying, 'I have not married this wife 
for myself only, but for your sakes also.' " And 
then the happy throng sang the hymn, that 
epithalamium of the redeemed soul, beginning 

116 



MADELEY 

"Blow ye the trumpet, blow, 

The gladly solemn sound! 
Let all the nations know, 

To earth's remotest bound, 
The year of jubilee is come! 
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home." 

And thereafter they worked together for the 
well-being of the Madeley flock until Fletcher's 
death, August 14, 1785, after which she con- 
tinued to reside in the vicarage, and there 
for thirty-one years she kept the anniversary 
of their wedding-day, and every day of every 
year was a blessing to the country parish in 
which her husband had lived and labored. 

Never more beautifully was this good man's 
devotion to his people shown than the last 
Sunday he spent with them. I am going to 
let his devoted companion tell the story of 
that holy day and scene. "I begged him not 
to go to the church in the morning; but to let 
a pious brother, who was with us, preach in 
the yard; but he told me, it was the will of 
the Lord that he should go. When I met a 
little company of our pious women, on Sunday 
morning, I begged they would pray that he 
might be strengthened. In reading the prayers, 
he almost fainted. I got through the crowd, 
with a friend, and entreated him to come out 
of the desk, as did some of the others; but 

117 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

in his sweet manner he let us know that we 
were not to interrupt the order of God. I 
then retired to my pew. All around were in 
tears. When he was a little refreshed by the 
windows being opened and a nosegay thrown 
into the desk by a friend, he proceeded with 
the service. Going into the pulpit, he preached 
with a strength and recollection which sur- 
prised us all. In his first prayer he said, 
'Lord, thou wilt manifest thy strength in 
weakness. We confer not with flesh and blood, 
but put our trust under the shadow of thy 
wings.' His text was, 'O Lord, thou preserv- 
est man and beast. How excellent is thy 
lovingkindness, O God! therefore the children 
of men put their trust under the shadow of 
thy wings.' After sermon, he went up the 
aisle to the communion table, with these words, 
'I am going to throw myself under the wings 
of the cherubim before the mercy-seat.' The 
congregation was large, and the service lasted 
till nearly two o'clock. Sometimes he could 
scarcely stand, and was often obliged to stop 
for want of power to speak. The people were 
deeply affected. Weeping was on every side. 
Notwithstanding his extreme weakness, he gave 
out several verses of hymns, and uttered 
various lively sentences of exhortation. As 

118 



MADELEY 

soon as the service was over, we hurried him 
away to bed, where he immediately fainted." 
When he recovered from this swoon he said to 
Mrs. Fletcher with a smile, "Now, my dear, 
thou seest I am no worse for doing the Lord's 
work. He never fails me when I trust him." 
He lingered on through the week, often express- 
ing himself in words of rapture and triumph. 
When another Sunday dawned it was seen that 
the end was not far distant. "From this time," 
concludes his wife's narrative, "he lay in a 
kind of sleep. And so remarkably composed 
— yea, triumphant — was his contenance, that 
the least trace of death was scarce discernible 
in it. About thirty-five minutes past ten on 
Sunday night, August 14, his precious soul 
entered into the joy of his Lord, without one 
struggle or groan, in the fifty-sixth year of 
his age. And here I break off my mournful 
story; but on my bleeding heart the fair 
picture of his heavenly excellencies will be for- 
ever drawn." Life's short day was over, and 
John Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, had been 
faithful to its end. 



119 



KIDDERMINSTER 

We had been spending some days in Oxford, 
and is there in all England a place of rarer 
charm? Late in the afternoon we had left our 
rooms in The Mitre to walk among the colleges 
and out into the fields, and at last found our- 
selves sauntering about Magdalen College and 
along that beautiful walk, the most beautiful 
in Oxford, known as Addison's Walk. It 
happened that earlier in the day I had been 
dipping into "The Spectator," where a sentence 
of Joseph Addison, who had been educated riere 
in Magdalen College, had arrested my attention. 
It was this: "I once met with a page of Mr. 
Baxter: upon the perusal of it, I conceived 
so good an idea of the author's piety that I 
bought the whole book." When Addison was 
born, in 1672, Richard Baxter had long been 
a conspicuous figure among the ecclesiastics of 
England, so conspicuous, indeed, that later some 
of its political leaders preferred to have him 
in prison. When or how the brilliant essayist 
of Magdalen found that "page," which so 
whetted his appetite, and was the beginning 
of his acquaintance with the most prolific 

120 




ADDISON'S WALK, OXFORD 




TOWER OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD 



KIDDERMINSTER 

theological writer of the seventeenth century, I 
do not chance to know, or whether he became 
as enthusiastic an admirer of the ascetic old 
"Independent," as Samuel Johnson, who quoted 
him several times in the "Rambler," mentioned 
him frequently in conversation with Boswell, 
and on one occasion, when that ubiquitous 
prodder asked which of Baxter's books he 
should read, replied with even excessive ve- 
hemence, which was quite unnecessary, of 
course, "Read any of them, for they are all 
good." It must have been on faith that this 
advice was given, for it may well be doubted 
whether Dr. Johnson, omnivorous reader though 
he was, had read all of the one hundred and 
sixty-eight or more volumes which Baxter 
wrote. 

As we walked under the beautiful trees 
which had given shade to Addison, and many 
others since his day, we talked of him, and of 
Baxter, and of the century in which they lived. 
That seventeenth century was assuredly a cen- 
tury of great names — of Cromwell, "the rugged, 
outcast Cromwell," as Carlyle called him; of 
Laud, "weak and ill-starred"; of Hampden, 
Pym, and Strafford; of Lovelace, unhappiest of 
Cavalier poets; of Samuel Butler, prince among 
the writers of English burlesque, and Evelyn 

121 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

and Pepys the diarists; of Sir Thomas Browne, 
Dryden, Locke, and Izaak Walton; of great 
preachers such as Owen, Howe, George Herbert, 
"that model of a man, a gentleman and a 
clergyman," as Coleridge characterized him; 
South, Barrow, Goodwin, Jeremy Taylor, the 
poet among preachers; Archbishop Usher, 
Donne, Hooker, Thomas Fuller, whom Charles 
Lamb thought an unequaled story-teller, and 
John Bunyan, who pictured the Sunny Delec- 
table Mountains, and the wonderful glory be- 
yond the Black River, as no writer of his age 
or any other age. And among all these Richard 
Baxter does not suffer by comparison with 
any or all of them. "If I were asked," says 
Brown in his "Puritan Preaching in England," 
"to single out one English town of the seven- 
teenth century which more than any other 
came under the influence of the Spirit of God; 
and one preacher who, more than most, was 
successful in winning men for Christ, and in 
organizing a vigorous church life under his 
pastorate, I should say that town was Kidder- 
minster and that preacher was Richard Baxter." 
And when the Baxter statue was unveiled in 
1875, the catholic-minded Dean Stanley, who 
was one of the speakers, as he was at the 
unveiling of the Bunyan statue in Bedford 

122 



KIDDERMINSTER 

about the same time, and on many similar non- 
conformist occasions, said among other good 
things: "There have been three or four parishes 
in England which have been raised by their 
pastors to a national, almost a world-wide fame. 
Of these the most conspicuous is Kidderminster : 
for Baxter without Kidderminster would have 
been but half of himself; and Kidderminster 
without Baxter would have had nothing but 
its carpets." 

This most conspicuous of English country 
parishes, now a considerable city with numerous 
churches, including several which contend for 
the honor of being the "Baxter's Church," is 
in the west of England, not far from Worcester 
with its stately cathedral. From Oxford it is 
not a hard journey, some eighty miles only, 
and through most beautiful mid-England scen- 
ery. It was July, the height of nature's 
season in England. The wild roses were still 
in bloom and the hedges sparkled with them; 
the numerous streams which flowed lazily 
through the meadows were covered with water 
lilies, and the fields flamed with poppies. The 
"Tom" Tower of Christ Church, Oxford., had 
hardly been lost to view, before we found 
ourselves in a perfect riot of color, which 
seemed, as we moved on to the northwest, to 

123 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

flow back like a glorious golden stream, to the 
fair university city. 

Kidderminster, like Madeley, is in the Severn 
Valley, some fifteen miles to the south. It is 
of ancient origin, there being various indica- 
tions that in Roman times a civilized people 
had already taken up residence in the vicinity. 
The etymology of the word Kidderminster is 
in doubt — there are various other spellings of 
it, such as Kideministra, Kideministre, Kida- 
ministr', and Kedirminstre — but the most prob- 
able conjecture is that it denotes the minster 
either of Saint Chad, or his almost equally 
famous brother Saint Ced, both of whom were 
the great apostles of the midlands, the former 
being the first bishop of Lichfield, A. D. 665, 
the latter Bishop of London, A. D. 664. This, 
however, is certain, that from the Norman 
Conquest, William the Conqueror owned prac- 
tically all the land. The village had for the 
most part an uneventful history. Before Rich- 
ard Baxter came to it there was little to relate 
concerning it. The most diligent search of the 
town records will yield only meager rewards. 
Henry III visited the place in 1226, and again 
seven years later. In 1665 coals were first 
brought here by water from Stourbridge. There 
is mention in the parish register of an earth- 

124 




ON THE SEVERN 




WORCESTER CATHEDRAL 



KIDDERMINSTER 

quake on the night of January 4, 1676. And 
more interesting than any other item is the 
account of the visit of John Howard, the 
famous Bedfordshire philanthropist, to the vil- 
lage jail, which consisted of two underground 
rooms called dungeons, about ten feet by six, 
near the market house, the keeper of which 
was the town crier, who was given an allowance 
of a shilling a month for attendance, and 
another shilling for straw for the prisoners' beds. 
But with the coming of Richard Baxter to 
the Kidderminster Church in 1641, things began 
to happen in the little village on the Stour 
River. This mother-church of Kidderminster 
was an old one. "Wheare should I begin," 
writes an old chronicler, "in thys faire churche 
but with the founder thereof, who appearethe 
in the middest of the highe and stately East 
window of the Quyre consist inge of seaven 
panes, in a long robe uppon his knees offeringe 
in his hand the portrature of the churche to 
God: neyther are we ignorant of hys name 
beeinge Johannes Niger de Kidderminster." 
But the name of the founder makes little 
difference. It was Baxter who made the church 
famous — and useful — in the community. It 
hadn't stood for much up to that time. Bax- 
ter's naive account of the condition of the 

125 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

church and his call to it is worth giving. It 
seems he had been preaching about a year in 
a town called Dudley, "in much comfort, 
amongst a poor, tractable people, lately noted 
for drunkenness," and for a time at Bridgnorth, 
where "the people proved a very ignorant, 
dead-hearted people, the town consisting too 
much of inns and ale houses, and having no 
general trade to employ the inhabitants in, 
which is the undoing of great towns. So that 
though, through the great mercy of God, my 
first labors were not without success, to the 
conversion of some ignorant and careless sinners 
unto God, and were over-valued by those that 
were already regardful of the concernments of 
their souls, yet were they not so successful as 
they proved afterwards in other places." When 
he had been here nearly two years he was 
invited to Kidderminster. The way of it, in 
Baxter's own words, was thus: 

"The long parliament, among other parts of 
their reformation, resolved to reform the cor- 
rupted clergy, and appointed a committee to 
receive petitions and complaints against them; 
which was no sooner understood, but multitudes 
in all countries came up with petitions against 
their ministers." 

"Among all these complainers, the town of 
126 



KIDDERMINSTER 

Kidderminster, in Worcestershire, drew up a 
petition against their minister. The vicar of 
the place they articled against as one that 
was utterly insufficient for the ministry; pre- 
sented by a papist; unlearned; preached but 
once a quarter, which was so weakly, as ex- 
posed him to laughter, and persuaded them 
that he understood not the very substantial 
article of Christianity; that he frequented ale 
houses, and had sometimes been drunk; that 
he turned the table altar-wise, &c. ; with more 
such as this." 

''The vicar, knowing his insufficiency, and 
hearing how two others in this case had sped, 
desired to compound this business with them, 
which was soon accomplished. Hereupon they 
invited me to them from Bridgnorth. The 
bailiff of the town, and all the feoffees, desired 
me to preach with them, in order to a full 
determination. My mind was much to the 
place, as soon as it was described to me, be- 
cause it was a full congregation, and most 
convenient temple; an ignorant, rude, and revel- 
ling people for the greater part, who had need 
of preaching; and yet had among them a 
small company of converts; who were humble, 
godly, and of good conversations, and not 
much hated by the rest, and therefore the 

127 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

fitter to assist their teacher; but, above all, 
because they had hardly ever had any lively, 
serious preaching among them. For Bridgnorth 
had made me resolve that I would never more 
go among a people that had been hardened in 
unprofitableness under an awakening ministry; 
but either to such as never had any convinc- 
ing preacher, or to such as had profited by 
him. As soon as I came to Kidderminster, and 
had preached there one day, I was chosen, 
without opposition; for though fourteen only 
had the power of choosing, they desired to 
please the rest. And thus I was brought, by 
the gracious providence of God, to that place 
which had the chief of my labours, and yielded 
me the greatest fruits of comfort. And I noted 
the mercy of God in this, that I never went 
to any place in my life, among all my changes, 
which I had before desired, designed, or thought 
of, much less sought; but only to those that I 
never thought of, till the sudden invitation 
did surprise me." Baxter was never a self- 
seeker. Neither ambition nor self-love deter- 
mined the course of his ministerial career. 

He was in his twenty-fifth year when he 
began his ministry in wicked Kidderminster, 
having been born in 1615. He must have 
been richly endowed with natural gifts, for he 

128 



KIDDERMINSTER 

went but a short time to school, the precarious 
state of his health from infancy preventing. 
He read much, however, and in particular 
numerous religious books, "consolatory books" 
he called them, which, as was often the case 
in those far off days, if not now, entered largely 
into the fashioning of his life. Like Herbert, 
but for a briefer period, he had some inclina- 
tion for court life, and spent a month at White- 
hall, but his sensitive conscience soon revolted. 
"I had quickly enough of the court," he writes; 
"when I saw a stage-play, instead of a sermon, 
on the Lord's day in the afternoon, and saw 
what course was there in fashion, and heard 
little preaching but what was, as to one part, 
against the puritans, I was glad to be gone. 
At the same time it pleased God that my 
mother fell sick, and desired my return; and 
so I resolved to bid farewell to those kinds of 
employments and expectations." 

"When I was going home again into the 
country, about Christmas day, A. D. 1634, the 
greatest snow began that hath been in this 
age, which continued thence till Easter, at 
which some places had it many yards deep; 
and before it was a very hard frost, which 
necessitated me to frost-nail my horse twice 
or thrice a day. On the road I met a waggon 

129 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

loaded, where I had no passage by, but on the 
side of a bank, which, as I passed over, all 
my horse's feet slipped from under him, and 
all the girths brake, and so I was cast just 
before the waggon wheel, which had gone over 
me, but that it pleased God that suddenly 
the horses stopped, without any discernible 
cause, till I was recovered; which commanded 
me to observe the mercy of my Protector." 
Back there in that serious Puritan age, people 
were on the watch for indications of the will 
of God. Jehovah was concerned in the affairs 
of nations and individuals, and had a way of 
separating men by his providences to the 
work for which he desired them, at least some 
of them so thought; and it is not surprising 
therefore that we find Baxter, because of this 
strange deliverance from death, and also on 
account of the serious condition of his health, 
"conscious of a thirsty desire of men's con- 
version and salvation," and we are prepared 
for the resolution which he took "that if one 
or two souls only might be won to God, it 
would easily recompense all the dishonor which, 
for want of titles, I might undergo from men." 
It may just as well be written down here 
as anywhere that his many sicknesses and 
bodily infirmities very largely determined all 

130 



KIDDERMINSTER 

his life the character of his work and teachings. 
It is his own testimony that the "continual 
expectation of death" was all through his life 
"an invaluable mercy" inasmuch as 

"i. It greatly weakened temptations. 

2. It kept me in a great contempt of the world. 

3. It taught me highly to esteem time; so that, if any of 

it passed away in idleness or unprofitableness, it 
was so long a pain and burden to my mind. 

4. It made me study and preach things necessary, and a 

little stirred up my sluggish heart to speak to sin- 
ners with some compassion, as a dying man to 
dying men." 

Like Pascal, he was "seldom an hour free from 
pain." He had about every disease named in 
the books, and some besides. No fewer than 
thirty-six doctors attended him at various 
times, and he took all their prescriptions, "be- 
ginning with scurvy-grass and boiled beer, and 
finishing with a golden bullet which had been 
recommended by a country quack." Might it 
not with reason be expected that all this 
suffering would color his preaching and writings ? 
Indeed, he seems to have been regarded by 
some in his day as a sad, morose, and unhappy 
man, but it is the testimony of those who 
knew him well that he was a singularly happy 
man. He himself says that he knew nothing 
of low spirits or nervous depression, notwith- 

1 3 1 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

standing his bodily ailments. What his sick- 
nesses did do for him was to give him an almost 
abnormal sense of the value of time; every 
moment was a fragment of eternity, for the 
right use of which he must give an account 
to God. When men live seriously, as Baxter 
did in the seventeenth century and Fletcher 
in the eighteenth, time is one of God's divinest 
gifts, and the wanton use of it one of the 
greatest of sins. On one occasion, when some 
visitors came to Baxter's house, and after 
sitting with him for a while said, "We are 
afraid, sir, that we break in upon your time," he 
was just frank enough to answer, "To be sure 
you do." Such a conception of time always 
gives directness to speech, urgency to manner, 
zeal and passion to endeavor. What his bodily 
weakness did for the world was that out of it 
came a book, which has been an inestimable 
blessing to thousands upon thousands. His 
"Saints' Everlasting Rest," a book which has 
been more widely read and more generally 
useful than any other English book except "The 
Pilgrim's Progress," was born of sickness. 
"Whilst I was in health I had not the least 
thought of writing books, or of serving God 
in more public way than preaching; but when 
I was weakened with great bleeding, and was 

132 



KIDDERMINSTER 

sentenced to death by the physicians, I began 
to contemplate more seriously on the ever- 
lasting rest which I apprehended myself to be 
on the borders of." 

His attitude toward life and suffering may 
be seen in these verses which he wrote: 

"Lord, it belongs not to my care, 
Whether I die or live ; 
To love and serve Thee is my share, 
And this Thy grace must give. 

"If life be long I will be glad, 
That I may long obey; 
If short— yet why should I be sad 
To soar to endless day? 

' ' Christ leads me through no darker rooms 
Than He went through before; 
He that unto God's kingdom comes, 
Must enter by this door. 

"Come, Lord, when grace has made me meet 
Thy blessed face to see ; 
For if Thy work on earth be sweet, 
What will Thy glory be! 

"Then I shall end my sad complaints, 
And weary, sinful days ; 
And join with the triumphant saints, 
To sing Jehovah's praise. 

"My knowledge of that life is small, 
The eye of faith is dim; 
But 'tis enough that Christ knows all, 
And I shall be with Him." 

*33 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

The church to which Baxter came is still 
standing, though it has undergone many radical 
alterations. It occupies a commanding posi- 
tion on the edge of a small hill, beneath which 
now runs a canal, and beyond, lower in the 
valley, a small stream called the Stour, the 
water of which is thought to possess a peculiar 
value in the washing of the worsted yarns 
used in the manufacture of the carpets for 
which Kidderminster has long been famed. 
The church-yard is planted with noble avenues 
of elms, some of which at least are traditionally 
said to have been planted by Baxter, which 
is not improbable. The building dates from 
about 13 1 5, and Baxter found it a "most 
convenient temple," "very capacious and the 
most commodious that ever I was in." But 
large as it was, with Baxter in the pulpit, 
and Baxter calling from house to house, and in 
all places speaking "as a dying man to dying 
men, ' ' it speedily became ' 'pitifully small. ' ' Gal- 
lery above gallery was added until there were 
five of them, and there was room for no more. 
When, however, in 1787 the church was "re- 
stored," the architect seems to have been at 
much pains to exorcise the spirit of the mighty 
preacher from the scene of his spiritual tri- 
umphs, and as veneration for his memory had 

134 




BAXTERS CHURCH 




A KIDDERMINSTER STREET 



KIDDERMINSTER 

in the century following his death appreciably 
waned, nearly all the furniture in use in his 
time was put up at auction and sold to the 
highest bidder, so that if one would see the 
Baxter relics in Kidderminster, he must look 
for them in other churches than the one in 
which he preached. Baxter's pulpit was pur- 
chased for the paltry sum of five pounds and 
placed in the Old Meeting, an independent 
church. When a split occurred, and part of 
the congregation seceded, the Baxter pulpit was 
carried away by the secessionists, and set up 
in the New Meeting (Unitarian) which they 
built, and there in a corner of the vestry it 
may be seen to-day. It is of oak, octagonal in 
shape, and elaborately adorned with carved 
flowers and other ornamentations common to 
the Jacobean period. In Baxter's day it must 
have been gorgeous with its gold and various 
bright colors, traces of which are still to be 
seen. On the face of the pulpit, and imme- 
diately beneath the preacher's desk, are the 
words "Praise the Lord," than which there 
could be no better. On one side of the pulpit 
is a framed manuscript, written by the Rev. 
George Butt, who was vicar of Baxter's church 
at the time of the sale of the church furniture 
in 1787, and a poet of more than local fame. 

135 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

His poem probably went with the pulpit, all 
for five pounds! But his lines are worth quot- 
ing in spite of this probability: 

"Here let the name of Baxter long be known; 
Here let his glory live, whom none excell'd 
In all the duties of the pastor's care; 
Whether his mental faculties you weigh, 
Or yet the noble virtues of his heart. 
Vain pomp and worldly riches he despised; 
That fame which strenuous virtue gives the few 
He saw, he sought, he seiz'd, then rais'd his head, 
Towering superior, like some cloud-capt cliff, 
Which scorns the fury of the stormy winds, 
Whence rushes forth the fertilizing stream 
To which the plenteous harvest owes its birth, 
(An harvest long remember' d through these plains,) 
Thus Baxter stood, amid surrounding foes. 
By his example fir'd, go, banish sloth; 
Pour forth the streams of sacred eloquence, 
Instruct, then add example's clearer light, 
And gain a harvest of immortal souls. 
Go, banish sloth; and strive to equal him; 
But vain the attempt. Let this at least be thine, 
(Whoe'er thou art, whate'er thy strength can do,) 
With pure benevolence to serve mankind, 
And, through a Saviour, gain immortal bliss." 

Baxter's communion table is in use in the 
Old Meeting, and the oak carved pews in 
the Countess of Huntingdon Chapel. Baxter's 
spirit of devotion and the work he accomplished 
in Kidderminster could not, however, be put up 
and sold at auction. Neither architect nor 

136 



KIDDERMINSTER 

vicar could thus lightly dispose of him. Per- 
sonality is something that cannot be bartered. 
The spiritual influence of a godly man like 
Richard Baxter "bloweth where it listeth" and 
cannot be transferred by sale or restrained by 
forget fulness. Baxter transformed Kiddermin- 
ster, and changes in his church, however icon- 
oclastic, cannot do away with Baxter. 

How the transformation was effected let the 
good man tell in his own way. But first it 
should be said that his early activities in 
Kidderminster created enmities and stirred up 
pronounced opposition. In the churchyard is a 
broken fragment of what was once the Kidder- 
minster Cross. Its destruction dates from Bax- 
ter's day, when it was broken in a riot in which 
his life was sought. It was on this spot that 
his life was twice attempted; once when he 
was attacked by a drunken parishioner, whom 
he had been compelled to eject from the com- 
munion of the church, who, as Baxter came 
into the churchyard, seized him with the 
purpose of killing him, but as he caught him 
by the coat, Baxter unbuttoned it, and leaving 
it in the man's hands got safely away. The 
other occasion was when ^Parliament had sent 
out an order for the demolition of all statues 
and images of any of the three Persons of the 

i37 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary, which should be 
found in the churches or on churchyard crosses. 
Then later came on the period of the Civil 
Wars, and Baxter's situation became critical, 
for he was right in the heart of the struggle, 
the main army of the king, commanded by 
Prince Rupert, and that of the Parliament under 
the Earl of Essex, being at that time not far 
distant. When he was preaching, October 23, 
1642, the sound of cannon was heard. It was 
the battle of Edgehill. When Charles I fled 
from the fatal field of Worcester, he skirted 
Kidderminster, and later that same evening 
some of the Royalist troops came galloping into 
the village, shouting the news of Cromwell's 
victory. "I was newly gone to bed," says 
Baxter, "when the noise of the Flying Horse 
acquainted us of the overthrow; and a piece 
of one of Cromwell's troops that guarded the 
bridge at Bewdley, having tidings of it, came 
into our streets, and stood in the open market- 
place, before my door, to surprise those that 
passed by; and so, when many hundreds of 
the flying army came together, and the thirty 
troopers cried 'Stand.' and fired at them, they 
either hasted away or cried quarter, not know- 
ing in the dark what number it was that charged 
them; thus, as manv were taken there as so 

"138 



KIDDERMINSTER 

few men could lay hold on; and, till midnight, 
the bullets flying towards my door and windows, 
and the sorrowful fugitives hastening by for 
their lives, did tell me the calamitousness of 
war." He was not a partisan, nor did he 
desire to be. When Cromwell invited him to 
become a chaplain to a company at Cambridge 
he declined the invitation, but later, when he 
went two days after the battle of Naseby to 
find some friends in Cromwell's army, seeing the 
dire need of his troops, and an opportunity for 
usefulness among the soldiers, he reconsidered 
and accepted, and it is recorded that he said 
some plain things about the moral condition of 
the parliamentary troops which much displeased 
their great leader. 

After his return to Kidderminster he gave 
fourteen fruitful years to that country parish. 
And now for his own story of his "employ- 
ments, successes, and advantages" there: 

"I preached, before the wars, twice each 
Lord's day; but after the war, but once, and 
once every Thursday, besides occasional ser- 
mons. Every Thursday evening, my neighbors 
that were most desirous and had opportunity 
met at my house, and there one of them re- 
peated the sermon, and afterwards they pro- 
posed what doubts any of them had about the 

i39 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

sermon, or any other case of conscience, and I 
resolved their doubts. And, last of all, I caused 
sometimes one, and sometimes another of them 
to pray, to exercise them; and sometimes I 
prayed with them myself, which, besides singing 
a psalm, was all they did. And once a week, 
also, some of the younger sort, who were not 
fit to pray in so great an assembly, met among 
a few more privately, where they spent three 
hours in pra} T er together. Every Saturday 
night they met at some of their houses to 
repeat the sermon of the last Lord's day, and 
to pray and prepare themselves for the follow- 
ing day. Once in a few weeks, we had a day 
of humiliation, on one occasion or other. Every 
religious woman that was safely delivered, in- 
stead of the old f eastings and gossipings, if 
they were able, did keep a day of thanksgiving, 
with some of their neighbours with them, 
praising God, and singing psalms, and soberly 
feasting together. Two days every week, my 
assistant and I myself took fourteen families 
between us for private catechising and confer- 
ence; he going through the parish, and the 
town coming to me. I first heard them recite 
the words of the catechism, and then examined 
them about the sense, and lastly urged them, 
with all possible engaging reason and vehemence, 

140 



KIDDERMINSTER 

to answerable affection and practice. If any of 
them were perplexed, through ignorance or bash- 
fulness, I forbore to press them any farther 
to answers, but made them hearers, and either 
examined others, or turned all into instruction 
and exhortation. But this I have opened more 
fully in my 'Reformed Pastor.' I spent about 
an hour with a family, and admitted no others 
to be present, lest bashfulness should make it 
burdensome, or any should talk of the weak- 
nesses of others. So that all the afternoons, on 
Mondays and Tuesdays, I spent in this, after 
I had begun it; for it was many years before 
I did attempt it; and my assistant spent the 
mornings of the same days in the same employ- 
ment. Before that, I only catechised them in 
the church, and conferred with, now and then, 
one occasionally. 

"Besides all this, I was forced, five or six 
years, by the people's necessity, to practise 
physic. A common pleurisy happening one 
year, and no physician being near, I was 
forced to advise them, to save their lives; 
and I could not afterwards avoid the impor- 
tunity of the town and country round about. 
And, because I never once took a penny of 
any one, I was crowded with patients, so that 
almost twenty would be at my door at once; 

141 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

and though God, by more success than I 
expected, so long encouraged me, yet, at last, 
I could endure it no longer; partly because it 
hindered my other studies, and partly because 
the very fear of miscarrying and doing any one 
harm did make it an intolerable burden to me. 
So that, after some years' practice, I procured 
a godly, diligent physician to come and live 
in the town, and bound myself, b)~ promise, 
to practise no more, unless in consultation with 
him in case of any seeming necessity. And 
so, with that answer, I turned them all off, 
and never meddled with it more. 

"My public preaching met with an attentive, 
diligent auditory. Having broke over the brunt 
of the opposition of the rabble before the 
wars, I found them afterwards tractable and 
unprejudiced. The congregation was usually 
full. Our private meetings also were full. On 
the Lord's day there was no disorder to be 
seen in the streets, but you might hear a hun- 
dred families singing psalms and repeating 
sermons, as you passed through the streets. 
In a word, when I came thither first, there 
was about one family in a street that wor- 
shipped God and called on his name ; and when 
I came away, there were some streets where 
there was not past one family in the side of 

142 




OLDEST DOOR IN KIDDERMINSTER 




INTERIOR BAXTER S CHURCH 



KIDDERMINSTER 

a street that did not so; and that did not, 
by professing serious godliness, give us hopes 
of their sincerity. And those families which 
were the worst, being inns and ale houses, 
usually some persons in each house did seem 
to be religious. 

"When I set upon personal conference with 
each family, and catechising them, there were 
very few families in all the town that refused 
to come; and those few were beggars at the 
town's ends, who were so ignorant that they 
were ashamed it should be manifest. And few 
families went from me without some tears, or 
seemingly serious promises for a godly life. 
Yet many ignorant and ungodly persons there 
were still among us; but most of them were 
in the parish, and not in the town, and in 
those parts of the parish which were farthest 
from the town. Some of the poor men did 
competently understand the body of divinity, 
and were able to judge in difficult controversies. 
Some of them were so able in prayer, that 
very few ministers did match them, in order 
and fullness, and apt expressions, and holy 
oratory, with fervency. Abundance of them 
were able to pray very laudably with their 
families, or with others. The temper of their 
minds, and the correctness of their lives, were 

143 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

much more laudable than their parts. The pro- 
fessors of serious godliness were generally of 
very humble minds and carriage; of meek and 
quiet behaviour unto others; and of blameless- 
ness in their conversations." That is a picture 
of a country pastor at work, which for sim- 
plicity and beauty is unmatched in literature. 
Sir James Stephen, the English statesman, and, 
until a short time of his death, regius pro- 
fessor of modern history in Cambridge Uni- 
versity, being succeeded in the professorship by 
Charles Kingsley, in his Essays in Ecclesias- 
tical Biography, a series of most valuable 
biographical studies, says: "Little was there in 
common between Kidderminster and the 'sweet 
smiling' Auburn. Still less alike were the 
'village preacher,' who 'ran his godly race,' 
after the fancy of Oliver Goldsmith, and the 
'painful preacher, ' whose emaciated form, gaunt 
visage, and Geneva bands attested the severity 
of his studies, and testified against prelatic 
ascendency. Deeper yet the contrast between 
the delicate hues and fine touches of the por- 
trait drawn from airy imagination, and Baxter's 
catalogue of his weekly catechisings, fasts, and 
conferences; of his Wednesday meetings and 
Thursday disputations; and of the thirty helps 
by which he was enabled to quicken into 

144 



KIDDERMINSTER 

spiritual life the inert mass of a rude and 
vicious population. But, truth against fiction, 
all the world over, in the rivalry for genuine 
pathos and real sublimity! Though ever new 
and charming, after ten thousand repetitions, 
the plaintive, playful, melodious poetry of the 
'Deserted Village' bears to the homely tale of 
the curate of Kidderminster a resemblance like 
that of the tapestried lists of a tournament 
to the well-fought field of Roncesvalles. Too 
prolix for quotation, and perhaps too sacred 
for our immediate purpose, it records one of 
those moral conquests which attest the exist- 
ence in the human heart of faculties which, 
even when most oppressed by ignorance, or 
benumbed by guilt, may yet be roused to 
their noblest exercise, and disciplined for their 
ultimate perfection." 

It was this same brilliant man who first 
interested Dean Stanley in Baxter, when he 
urged him to read the last twenty-four pages 
of the first part of "Baxter's Narrative of His 
Own Life." "Lose not a day," he said, "in 
reading it. You will never repent of it." 
"That very night," says Stanley, "I followed 
his advice, and I have ever since publicly and 
privately advised every theological student to 
do the same." 

i45 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

The house in which Baxter lived in Kidder- 
minster is still standing. It is on High Street, 
two houses from the old Town Hall, and a 
short stone's throw from the famous Bull Ring, 
in which the Baxter memorial statue was 
placed. The houses on this side of the street 
are without back yards, as another street — 
Swan Street, or as it is commonly called "Behind 
Shops" — runs directly back of them. Baxter's 
house was in a noisy location for one who 
held as many meetings in the parsonage as 
he did, and who wrote so constantly when not 
otherwise engaged. Had he not been the 
unselfish man that he was, he might have had, 
like Herbert and Kingsley, a much larger and 
more commodious house in a quieter situation, 
and a garden "girdled with trees." But such 
was his goodness of heart that he would never 
occupy the rectory, although Parliament author- 
ized him to do so, preferring to allow the old 
vicar to live in it without interference. Here 
in this small and unattractive High Street 
house, Baxter dwelt during the twenty years 
he was in Kidderminster. His study was the 
front room on the first floor, and here he re- 
ceived his friends and held his meetings. His 
library must have been a large one, the books 
being arranged on shelves placed against the 

146 



KIDDERMINSTER 

walls. Many of these books must have been 
ponderous volumes, and some one has wittily 
suggested that their nature may be judged 
from his quotations in his published writings. 
Once when in this library he had a narrow 
escape as he himself relates: "As I sat in my 
study at Kidderminster, the weight of my great- 
est folio books broke down three or four of 
the highest shelves, and I sat close under them, 
and they fell down on every side of me, and 
not one of them hit me, save one upon the arm, 
whereas the place, the weight, and greatness of 
the books was such, and my head just under 
them that it was a wonder they had not beaten 
out my brains, one of the shelves right over 
my head having the six volumes of Dr. Walton's 
'Oriental Bible' and all Austin's works, and the 
'Bibliotheca Patrum' and 'Marlote.' " That 
was a narrow escape. 

Baxter was always a lover of books. When 
he had become a wanderer, after having refused 
the king's offer of the bishopric of Hereford 
in order that he might remain with his flock 
at Kidderminster, and then being forced to 
leave because of the state of public affairs, 
he begged to be permitted "quietly to follow 
my brief study and once again have the use 
of my books, which I have not seen this ten 

i47 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

years, and hope for a room for their standing 
at Kidderminster where they are eaten with 
worms and rats, having no security for my 
quiet abode in any place enough to encourage 
me to send for them." Later, permission was 
given him to remove his library to London, 
more than "a hundred miles, and paid dear for 
the carriage." But within the next few years 
his goods were so frequently levied upon for 
the fees against illegal preaching, that after 
first hiding his library he was compelled to 
sell it. He writes, "My books have been my 
treasure, and I value little more on earth. I 
have been now without a treasure." What few 
books remained to him when he died, he be- 
queathed these to "poor scholars." 

Here in his Kidderminster study he wrote 
his sermons, which ranked with the best of the 
productions of the Puritan divines. Doddridge 
placed them first, saying of Baxter's preaching, 
"I cannot forebear looking upon him as one 
of the greatest orators our nation hath pro- 
duced." As a rule kings don't seem to care 
much for long sermons, but Charles II could 
listen to Baxter two hours. This preacher 
took his pulpit work seriously. For years he 
entered the pulpit in the fear that he might 
not leave it alive; his knees shook under him, 

148 



KIDDERMINSTER 

not from fear of the faces of men; but because 
he had to preach in the sight of God — "as of 
God, in the sight of God, speak we in Christ." 
"Of all preaching in the world," he wrote, 
"that speaks not stark lies, I hate that preach- 
ing which tendeth to make the hearers laugh, 
or to move their minds with tickling levity, and 
affect them, as stage-players use to do, instead 
of affecting them with a holy reverence for 
the name of God." Simple, direct, and without 
ornamentation in style, intense in utterance, 
and powerful in appeal, Baxter preached with 
the eloquence of a soul burning with devotion 
alike to God and to men. "I several times 
heard Baxter preach," says Calamy, one of 
his biographers, "which I remember not to have 
done before. He talked in the pulpit with 
great freedom about another world, like one 
that had been there, and was come as a sort 
of express from thence to make a report con- 
cerning it. He was well advanced in years, 
but delivered himself in public as well as in 
private, with great vivacity and freedom, and 
his thoughts had a peculiar edge." 

It was here too at Kidderminster that his 
best known books were written. Baxter was 
an amazingly productive author, far more so 
than any man of his time. The number and 

149 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

extent of his works almost passes belief, when 
one considers his immense correspondence — 
scores of people wrote him. concerning matters 
of conscience and questions of doctrine and 
interpretation of the Scriptures — his constant 
ill health, and his many pastoral concerns. 
Orme, his chief biographer, makes this astound- 
ing comparative statement: "The works of 
Bishop Hall amount to ten volumes octavo; 
Lightfoot's extend to thirteen; Jeremy Taylor's 
to fifteen; Dr. Goodwin's would make about 
twenty; Dr. Owen's extend to twenty-eight; 
Richard Baxter's, if printed in a uniform edi- 
tion, could not be compressed in less than 
sixty volumes, making more than from thirty 
to forty thousand closely printed pages." The 
total number of his separate publications is 
given as one hundred and sixty-eight or there- 
abouts, nearly sixty of which were issued during 
his Kidderminster pastorate. Some of these 
were small tracts, and some broad sheets, or 
hand-bills. He believed thoroughly in this way 
of spreading the truth, finding it a distinct 
help in his pastoral work. There were also 
numerous quarto volumes, which having served 
their purpose, have now, as Hallam says of 
the books of another writer, "ceased to belong 
to men and have become the property of 

150 




BAXTERS STATUE, KIDDERMINSTER 




TRIMPLEY GREEN 



KIDDERMINSTER 

moths." But three of the books which he 
wrote in the study of the Kidderminster house 
are immortal. They are his "Saints' Rest," 
his "Call to the Unconverted," which Bishop 
Asbury considered "one of the best pieces of 
human composition in the world to awaken 
the lethargic souls of poor sinners," and his 
"Reformed Pastor," as profitable perhaps, every- 
thing considered, from the pastoral point of 
view, as any book ever published. These 
three books are among the classics. "The 
Saints' Everlasting Rest," the second book he 
published, was, as I have said, born of sickness 
and pain, and so helpful was it to so many 
people that more than one writer has said 
that Baxter needs no other memorial so long 
as there is a copy of this book in existence. 
It is a quarto volume of more than eight hun- 
dred pages, and was written in six months. He 
dedicated it to his "Dearly Beloved Friends, 
the Inhabitants of Kidderminster." Alterations 
were made in subsequent editions, one very 
amusing one being the omission of the names 
of Brook, Hampden, and Pym, as among 
those whom he rejoiced to have the prospect 
of meeting in heaven ! He -wanted to please 
the enemies of Puritanism, but his hope was 
not realized. Notwithstanding this exhibition 

151 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

of partisan weakness, this has been one of the 
most useful of his works, particularly for Chris- 
tians, for whom it was chiefly intended. 

His "Call to the Unconverted" was writ- 
ten on the suggestion of Bishop Usher, who 
desired the great controversialist, at the same 
time a most gentle guide of all who were in 
rough places, to set down plain directions 
suited to the various states of Christians. The 
book has had a circulation of hundreds of 
thousands of copies, and has been singularly 
blessed to many troubled hearts. "Through 
God's mercy I have had information of almost 
whole households converted by this small book, 
which I set so light by. And as if all this 
in England, Scotland, and Ireland, were not 
mercy enough to me, God, since I was silenced, 
hath sent it over on its message to many 
beyond the seas ; for when Mr. Eliot had printed 
all the Bible in the Indians' language, he next 
translated this my 'Call to the Unconverted,' 
as he wrote to us here." 

This reference to John Eliot, the "apostle to 
the Indians," opens an interesting chapter in 
Baxter's career. Eliot had been born in England 
in 1604, and had been educated at Cambridge. 
It was in 1631, when Baxter was a young lad 
of sixteen, that he sailed from England for 

152 



KIDDERMINSTER 

Boston. Whether Baxter met him before his 
departure, may be doubted, but he was always 
deeply interested in Eliot's work among the 
Indians. He not only wrote him concerning it, 
but Governor Endicott of Massachusetts, and 
others. His correspondence with Eliot, of whom 
he once said, "There is no man on earth that 
I honor above him," continued during their 
lives, and that Baxter was interested in mis- 
sionary efforts in an age when such beneficent 
enterprises were few, and when sympathetic 
support of them was rarer, is to his credit. 

The greatest of the books which he wrote at 
Kidderminster, and unquestionably the greatest 
of all his works, is "The Reformed Pastor," 
which has been universally commended as an 
invaluable contribution to the literature of the 
pastoral life. Perhaps no other book drives 
home the sense of clerical responsibility with 
such tremendous power. Of it Philip Doddridge 
said: " 'The Reformed Pastor' is a most extraor- 
dinary performance and should be read by 
every young minister before he takes a people 
under his stated care, and I think the practical 
part of it review every three or four years, 
for nothing would have a greater tendency to 
awaken the spirit of a minister to that zeal 
in his work, for want of which many good 

153 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

ministers are but shadows of what by the 
blessing of God they might be, if the maxims 
and measures laid down in this incomparable 
treatise were strenuously pursued. ' ' Van Ooster- 
zee, one of the greatest of writers on Practical 
Theology, says that it was an inestimable bless- 
ing for England that at this same period, 
namely, the seventeenth century, the powerful 
voice of Richard Baxter in his "Reformed 
Pastor" was raised to proclaim so earnestly the 
indispensable necessity of individual pastoral 
care; and in another place, speaking of the 
wonderful reception which was accorded to 
Wesley's preaching, Van Oosterzee stated that 
the secret of it was to be found exclusively 
in the power of truth on the consciences of men, 
and upon the personality of the preacher itself, 
and then asks, "And in what else is to be 
sought the key to the power with which John 
Bunyan (d. 1688), the writer of the 'Pilgrim's 
Progress,' and Richard Baxter (d. 1691), the 
author of the 'Reformed Pastor,' could by 
their simple language attract and win so many, 
and yet speak so long after their death?" 
There are numerous points of likeness between 
these three men, Baxter, Bunyan, and Wesley. 
They alike preached mightily, and alike wrote 
books that have permanent elements of value 

i54 



KIDDERMINSTER 

in them. If Wesley was the greatest preacher 
and Bunyan the greatest writer, Baxter was 
the greatest pastor. He was not a parish 
priest who lived apart from men; he had 
business with them and went where they were. 
He coveted them for God. He was the greatest 
pastoral evangelist of his age. On one occasion 
when Baxter was praying, and the devil seized 
the opportunity to tempt him along the line 
of his popularity as a preacher, the simple- 
hearted man cried out, "Not this, not this, 
O Lord, but the souls of this poor people of 
Kidderminster!" Baxter was the pastor pre- 
eminent. It was out of his experiences as a 
country pastor at Kidderminster that he wrote 
his immortal book, and this book, like Herbert's 
"Country Parson," must be considered as a 
full portrayal of his own marvelously successful 
work as a pastoral evangelist, and the prin- 
ciples by which he was guided. It was begun 
as a sermon to be preached at a meeting of 
preachers for humiliation and prayer, December 
4, 1655, but Baxter was ill and unable to be 
present. The text of the sermon which is the 
silver thread running through the volume is 
taken from Acts 20. 28: "Take heed therefore 
to yourselves and to all the flock over which 
the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to 

155 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

feed the church of God which he hath pur- 
chased with his own blood"; the main purpose 
of the sermon is to show the nature and value 
of pastoral work, especially in private instruc- 
tion and catechising. Baxter laid much em- 
phasis upon the importance of catechising. 
Herein, in the zeal and the affection which he 
displayed in following his people to their 
homes for the purpose of applying with more 
close and pungent force the truths he announced 
from the pulpit, lay the secret of his conspic- 
uous success. It is noteworthy that his suc- 
cesses in the earliest period of his ministry were 
among the young. In his preface to his work 
"A Compassionate Counsel to all Young Men," 
he says, "In the place where God most blessed 
my labors at Kidderminster, my first and 
greatest success was upon the youth." Baxter 
insisted that catechising was a more difficult 
work than sermonizing, and I am not sure 
that it does not lay heavier demands upon 
ministers to do fine and successful pastoral 
work than it does to preach. It is a hard task 
which he sets for every minister, in country 
parish or city church. "The ministerial work," 
he says, "must be managed purely for God 
and the salvation of the people, and not for 
any private ends of our own. A wrong end 

156 



KIDDERMINSTER 

makes all the work bad, how good soever in 
itself. It is not serving God, but ourselves, 
if we do it not for God, but for ourselves. They 
that set about this as a common work, to 
make a trade of it for their worldly livelihood, 
will find that they have chosen a bad trade, 
though a good employment. Self-denial is of 
absolute necessity in every Christian, but of a 
double necessity in a minister, as he hath a 
double sanctification or dedication to God. 
Without self-denial he cannot do God an 
hour's faithful service." Or take this other 
passage: "So great a God, whose message we 
deliver, should be honored by our delivery of 
it. It is a lamentable case, that in a message 
from the God of heaven, of everlasting con- 
sequence to the souls of men, we should behave 
ourselves so weakly, so unhandsomely, so impru- 
dently, or so slightly, that the whole business 
should miscarry in our hands, and God be 
dishonored, and sinners rather hardened than 
converted, and all this much through our weak- 
ness or neglect ! How many a time have carnal 
hearers gone jeering home at the palpable and 
dishonorable failings of the preacher! How 
many sleep under us, because our hearts and 
tongues are sleepy; and we bring not with us 
so much skill and zeal as to awaken them!" 

i57 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Writers on Homiletics refer to this book 
almost more frequently than any other. When 
they want to sharpen the point of some state- 
ment or reinforce their own position, they 
turn to "The Reformed Pastor." At random 
I take from a shelf a book. It chances to be 
Gladden 's, "The Christian Pastor," and almost 
the first paragraph that strikes my eye is this: 
"When we are commanded," says Baxter, "to 
'take heed to all the flock,' it is plainly implied 
that flocks must be no greater, regularly and 
ordinarily, than we are capable of overseeing 
or taking heed of; that particular churches 
should be no greater, or ministers no fewer, 
than may consist with taking heed to all; 
for God will not lay upon us natural impossi- 
bilities. He will not bind men on so strict 
account as we are bound, to leap up to the 
moon, to touch the stars, to number the sands 
of the sea. If it be the pastoral work to over- 
see and take heed of all the flock, then surely 
there must be such a proportion of pastors 
assigned to each flock, or such a number of 
souls in the care of each pastor, as he is able 
to take such heed to as is here required." 
The next book on the shelf is Christlieb's 
"Lectures on Preaching," and in this I note: 
"The classical work of Richard Baxter, 'The 

158 




ARLEY VILLAGE 




SAINT PETER S CHURCH, ARLEY 



KIDDERMINSTER 

Reformed Pastor, ' is highly to be recommended. 
There, inter alia, we read: 'It is a fearful thing 
to be an unsanctified professor, but much more 
to be an unsanctified preacher. Doth it not 
make you tremble when you open the Bible, 
lest you should read there the sentence of 
your own condemnation? When you pen your 
sermons, little do you think that you are 
drawing up indictments against your own souls ! 
When you are arguing against sin, that you 
are aggravating your own!' " And a glance at 
the next book in the row, and the next, and the 
next, discloses a like appreciation of Baxter as a 
pastor or a writer. 

My own copy of this book bears date of i860. 
Following the title-page are these words, which 
were spoken a few hours before he died by 
Richard Knill, a distinguished English mis- 
sionary and preacher, who was the first to 
direct Spurgeon's attention to the ministry: 
"If, without impropriety, I may refer here, as 
I believe I have done -elsewhere, to the service 
which, during fifty-four years, I have been 
allowed to render to our great Master, I may 
declare my thankfulness in being able, in some 
small degree, to rejoice that the conversion of 
sinners has been my aim. I have made, next 
to the Bible, Baxter's 'Reformed Pastor' my 

i59 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

rule as regards the object of my ministry. 
It were well if that volume were often read by 
all our pastors — a study which I now earnestly 
recommend to them." And the more I read 
the book, the more convinced I am of the 
value of the advice. Had Baxter done nothing 
else in his country parish except to write "The 
Reformed Pastor," his fame would be sure, 
but he could not have written it, had he done 
less than he did do. He made over Kidder- 
minster, and "The Reformed Pastor" is both 
the witness and the proof. 

There came a time, however, when Baxter 
could no longer remain at Kidderminster. The 
Act of Uniformity passed in 1662, which re- 
quired among other intolerable things assent 
to everything prescribed in the "Book of 
Common Prayer," drove him and some two 
thousand other clergymen from the church. 
And when he left the scene of his apostolic 
labors and his weeping people, it was "to pass 
the remainder of his life in loathsome jails or 
precarious hiding places, there to achieve in 
penury and almost ceaseless pain works with- 
out a parallel in the history of English theo- 
logical literature, for their extent, or their 
prodigality of intellectual wealth." When 
Wordsworth wrote his sonnet on "Clerical 

160 



KIDDERMINSTER 

Integrity," may he not have had Richard 
Baxter in mind : 

"Nor shall the eternal roll of praise eject 
Those Unconforming; whom one rigorous day 
Drives from their Cures, a voluntary prey 
To poverty, and grief, and disrespect, 
And some to want — as if by tempests wrecked 
On a wild coast; how destitute! did They 
Feel not that Conscience never can betray, 
That peace of mind is Virtue's sure effect. 
Their altars they forego, their homes they quit, 
Fields which they love, and paths they daily trod, 
And cast the future upon Providence; 
As men the dictate of whose inward sense 
Outweighs the world; whom self -deceiving wit 
Lures not from what they deem the cause of God." 

When Baxter left Kidderminster he did not 
go alone. Up to this time he had remained 
unmarried, nor had he thought to marry, but 
shortly after his ejection from the church he 
wed "a lady of gentle birth," who until her 
death nineteen years later, was his devoted 
comrade and friend. ''In prison, in sickness, in 
evil report, in every form of danger and fatigue, 
she was still with unabated cheerfulness at the 
side of him to whom she had pledged her con- 
jugal faith: prompting him to the discharge 
of every duty, calming the asperities of his 
temper, his associate in unnumbered acts of 
philanthropy, embellishing his humble home by 

161 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the little arts with which a cultivated mind 
imparts its own gracefulness to the meanest 
dwelling-place ; and during the nineteen years of 
their union, joining with him in one unbroken 
strain of filial affiance to the Divine mercy, 
and of a grateful adoration for the Divine 
goodness." After her death Baxter wrote what 
he called "A Breviate of Her Life," in which 
he drew a portrait of her, the original of which, 
as Sir James Stephen says, it would have been 
criminal not to love. Of his imprisonment 
on the charge of heresy, sedition, and hostility 
to the episcopacy, and of his trial before Judge 
Jeffreys, at which that ill-bred justice, whose 
conduct during the trial has been faithfully 
portrayed by Macaulay in a famous passage, 
adorned the sick, aged, and feeble prisoner with 
such epithets as "the old rogue who has poisoned 
the world with his Kidderminster doctrine," 
"the old blockhead," "a conceited, stubborn, 
fanatical dog," "an old knave," "the unthank- 
ful villain," and other such, little more need 
be said. He is found guilty, of course. That 
had already been decided upon. When at the 
conclusion of the charge of the Chief Justice 
Baxter asked him, "Does your lordship think 
any jury will pretend to pass a verdict upon 
me upon such a trial?" his lordship answered, 

162 



KIDDERMINSTER 

'Til warrant you, Mr. Baxter; don't you trouble 
yourself about that." He is sent to prison, but 
what prison could hold a soul like his? Mat- 
thew Henry, the commentator, visits him, and 
finds him "rejoicing in God." He writes to old 
friends at Arley, Trimpley Green, and Wolver- 
ley, all near Kidderminster, and where he had 
occasionally preached when he was a country 
pastor. He writes to friends in other places 
also, and day by day during the two years of 
imprisonment lives over the happy, useful years 
at Kidderminster. Ah, those years in that 
country parish were his best years. Of all the 
lines he wrote, none show deeper feeling or 
more tender sympathy than those in his poem 
"Love Breathing Thanks and Praise," in which 
he writes of Kidderminster and his work in 
that parish: 

"But among all, none did so much abound 
With fruitful mercies as that barren ground, 
Where I did make my best and longest stay, 
And bore the heat and burden of the day ; 
Mercies grew thicker there than summer flowers; 
They over-numbered my daies and hours. 
There was my dearest flock and special charge, 
Our hearts in mutual love Thou did'st enlarge: 
'Twas there that mercy did my labors bless 
With the most great and wonderful success." 



163 



SOMERSBY 

"I am now at Somersby," wrote the brilliant 
Arthur Hallam, in the spring of 1832, to an 
intimate acquaintance, "not only as the friend 
of Alfred Tennyson, but as the lover of his 
sister," and thus as by magic we find ourselves 
in the rectory of a country parish in England, 
which will be famous for all time as the birth- 
place of one of the greatest of English poets in 
the nineteenth century. Poor Hallam, of whom 
Gladstone said, quoting lines from Aubrey de 
Vere's Man.- Tudor: 

"I marked him 
As a far Alp ; and loved to watch the sunrise 
Dawn on his ample brow," 

his was a short, swift course, for he died the 
following year, but how. save by that untimely 
death, would we have had "In Memoriam," un- 
questionably the greatest single contribution, 
outside the Bible, to the literature of the im- 
mortal life? Frederick TV. Robertson, one of 
England's rarest prophet -preachers in Tenny- 
son's century, went so far as to say: "To my 
mind and heart the most satisfactory things 

164 



SOMERSBY 

that have been ever said on' the future state are 
contained in this poem." 

Somersby, where the poet was born, and 
where his boyhood was spent, is in the east of 
England, not far from the German Ocean. It 
is in the county of Lincolnshire, the chief city 
of which is Lincoln, famed for its cathedral, the 
stately towers of which may be seen for forty 
miles. There has long been a notion that Lin- 
colnshire is dull and uninteresting, much of 
the land of this section of England having been 
at some early period inundated by the sea, and 
in more recent years, like so much of Holland, 
recovered from it. Henry the Eighth called 
the county "one of the most brute and beestilie 
of the whole realm," and there was some ground 
for such a judgment, for in his day the work 
of reclamation of the lands by drainage had 
not been begun. Modern writers, like Haw- 
thorne and Ruskin, concur in the opinion of 
another king, George the Third, that "it was 
all flats, fogs, and fens." Most of the county is 
undoubtedly more level than other parts of 
England, yet not all of the county is flat. 
There are here and there wooded hills, which 
rise out of deep valleys, and. everywhere scenes 
of pastoral beauty. Charles Kingsley, who 
knew this fen-country as few men, wrote of it 

165 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

with enthusiasm. It is not an unattractive 
part of England. Somersby and the region 
round about are full of charm. Almost the 
opening paragraph of Hallam Tennyson's 
worthy biography of his distinguished father 
reads: "Halfway between Horncastle and 
Spilsby, in a land of quiet villages, large fields, 
gray hillsides, and noble, tall-towered churches, 
on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold, the 
pastoral hamlet of Somersby nestles embosomed 
in trees." How well he knew the place, and 
how beautifully he described it. Returning 
from a visit to his father's old home, on one 
occasion, he told him that the trees had grown 
up, shutting out the view from the rectory, 
and that the house itself was beginning to 
look forlorn and desolate, to which the poet, 
with a tinge of sadness, answered, "Poor little 
place!" But it was not that sort of a place a 
half century before, in those glorious days 
when "life was young" for the Somersby rec- 
tor's "seven tall sons." 

George Clayton Tennyson, the poet's father, 
became rector of Somersby in 1807. Pre- 
vious to his settling here he had married 
Miss Fytche, the daughter of the vicar of 
Louth. "My grandfather had no real calling 
for the ministry of the church," said Hallam 

166 




LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, CENTRAL TOWER 



SOMERSBY 

Tennyson, "yet he faithfully strove to do his 
duty." Some modern writers, it would appear 
from this observation of Lord Tennyson's 
gifted son, recognize the importance of a "real 
calling" to the Christian ministry! More than 
a "mere bent" in that direction is necessary. 
Dr. Tennyson, from whatever motive he took 
holy orders, did his work as a parish minister 
faithfully. He was a versatile man, of great 
ability, a scholar, knowing well Hebrew and 
Syriac, and later learning Greek that he might 
teach his sons. He had a splendid library, and 
amid the quiet of his study, with long shelves 
of books looking down upon them, the children 
of the parsonage gained their early knowledge 
of books, and read widely of Shakespeare, 
Milton, Burke, Goldsmith, Rabelais, Sir Wil- 
liam Jones, Addison, Swift, Defoe, Cervantes, 
and Bunyan. Whatever of languages, of lit- 
erature, of mathematics and natural science, 
and of the fine arts, the boys learned before 
going to Cambridge University he taught them. 
Until recently there resided at Bag-Enderby, 
which was part of the parish, an old man who 
was born there in the same year as the poet. 
He had many reminiscences to relate of his 
boyhood, and the way he summed up his recol- 
lections of Dr. Tennyson was, "The doctor 

167 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

wur all for reading." He also recollected the 
Misses Tennyson as "young ladies who were 
never seen without a book in their hands." 
Books, a love for them, and a chance to read 
them, this was a compensating feature of the 
life in the rectory at Somersby. This man's 
gifts were not "somewhat thrown away in a 
country parsonage," as R. F. Horton thinks. 
He may have been a moody and disappointed 
man, "daily racked by bitter fancies and tossed 
about by strong troubles." The knowledge 
that he had been disinherited — he was the 
eldest son and heir of a large estate, which was 
left to the second son — may have poisoned his 
days, the people among whom he lived may 
have been uncouth and without manners — the 
story is told that the rector's coachman even, 
when chided for not keeping the harness clean, 
came into the house and, throwing the harness 
on the floor, angrily cried out, "Clean it your- 
self then" — but people loved him, the poor 
especially were fond of him, and by all classes 
his pastoral oversight was welcomed and much 
esteemed. He had great tenderness of heart, 
but not more than the wife and mother of the 
parsonage, to whom it is said the boys of a 
neighboring village used to bring their dogs 
and beat them in order to be bribed to leave 

168 



SOMERSBY 

off, or to induce her to buy them. Dr. Tenny- 
son's social powers were famous throughout 
the country. The tradition long lingered among 
the old barristers that, as young men, when 
they came to Spilsby to attend court, they 
always tried to persuade him to join with them 
because of his geniality and brilliant conversa- 
tion. He was always reading, and when going 
alone for a walk would take a book with him. 
"One day in the winter, the snow being deep, 
he did not hear the Louth mail coming up 
behind him. Suddenly 'Ho! ho!' from the 
coachman roused him. He looked up, and 
found a horse's nose and eyes above his shoulder 
as if reading the book. He stood six feet two, 
and was strong and energetic. Tim Green, the 
Somersby rat-catcher, a great ally of the young 
Tennysons, said, 'I remember the oud doctor. 
What a clip he used to goa betweean the 
chooorches o' Somersby an' Enderby!' " Ah! 
how many a parson riding his circuit has found a 
ready excuse for haste, even on the Lord's Day! 
Tennyson's mother was a beautiful woman. 
"When she was almost eighty, a daughter, 
under cover of her deafness, ventured to men- 
tion the number of offers of marriage which 
had been made to her mother, naming twenty- 
four. Suddenly, to the amusement of all 

169 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

present, the old lady said emphatically, and 
quite simply, as for truth's sake, 'No, my dear, 
twenty-five.' She had a great sense of humor, 
which made her room a paradise for the chil- 
dren. They inherited her love of animals and 
her pity 'for all wounded wings.' " Her chil- 
dren, to whom she gave herself completely, 
gave her measureless love and reverence al- 
ways. Lord Tennyson, in his early poem 
"Isabel," draws a portrait of her: 

"Eyes not down-dropt nor overbright, but fed 
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity, 
Clear, without heat, undying, tended by 

Pure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane 
Of her still spirit ; locks not widespread, 

Madonna-wise on either side her head; 
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign 
The summer calm of golden charity, 
Were fixed shadows of thy fixed mood, 

Revered Isabel, the crown and head, 
The stately flower of female fortitude, 

Of perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead. 
The world hath not another 
(Tho' all her fairest forms are types of thee, 
And thou of God in thy great charity) 
Of such a finish'd chasten'd purity." 

When she died, in 1865, in her eighty-fifth 
year, the poet wrote in his diary after the 
funeral, "All has gone oft very quietly. A 
funeral came before us and a funeral followed. 

170 



SOMERSBY 

I could have wished for the country church- 
yard." His thoughts turned to Somersby that 
sad hour, where a generation before his father 
had been laid to rest, as often during the in- 
tervening years they had reverted to the quiet 
place, for he was thinking of it when he wrote: 

"Our father's dust is left alone 
And silent under other snows : 
There in due time the woodbine blows, 
The violet comes, but we are gone." 

There was a happy household in the Som- 
ersby parsonage. But first let George G. 
Napier describe the house, as he does in his 
"Homes and Haunts of Tennyson": "The main 
entrance — what Tennyson calls 'my father's 
door' — is on the side facing the road, but the 
house as thus approached is not seen to ad- 
vantage. When, however, it is viewed from 
the south, where the creepers clamber up the 
yellow-washed walls, it looks so sweet one does 
not wonder at the regrets the poet had in leav- 
ing such a picturesque home. The classic lawn, 
the scene of so many gatherings, slopes gently 
away to a little garden, quaint and old- 
fashioned, intersected with walks of turf and 
girt with high evergreen hedges. In this se- 
cluded spot no sounds fall on the ear but those 
which belong essentially to the pure country — 

171 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the ripple of the brook murmuring in its sum- 
mer sleep, the lowing of 'the white kine,' the 
bleating of 'the thick-fleeced sheep,' or the 
cooing in the distant woods 'of the day-long- 
murmuring woodpigeon.' The trees add greatly 
to the beauty of the place, many of the poet's 
favorites, such as the elms and beeches, still 
spreading their canopy of leaves over the 
verdure underneath; but alas! the 'towering 
sycamore' and 'the poplars four' will be no 
more seen. When Walter White visited Som- 
ersby, in i860, he found only three poplars 
waving behind the house, as one had disap- 
peared; now all are gone — in Mr. Rawnsley's 
choice language, 'they only whisper in the 
Laureate's song.' 

"As for the interior of the old manor-house, 
it may be said to have all the peculiar charm 
of an English country home. The ivy-mantled 
door opens on a square hall, adorned with 
many tokens of the chase, crossing which we 
enter the drawing-room, rich with pictures, 
china, and a wealth of bric-a-brac. It is 
charmingly sunny, being lit with two large 
windows on a level with the lawn, and for 
cheerfulness is quite a contrast to a somewhat 
dingy room on the opposite side of the passage, 
which must have been associated with sad 

172 




LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, CHOIR, LOOKING EAST 




SOMERSBY RECTORY 



SOMERSBY 

memories, as in it Dr. Tennyson died. Passing 
along a dimly lighted corridor, a pointed Gothic 
door opens on the dining hall. This apartment 
is one of stately dimensions, having been de- 
signed by the rector himself, who to his many 
other accomplishments added a thorough 
knowledge of architecture, the groined roof 
and high ecclesiastical windows, the beauti- 
fully modeled mantelpiece, and carved paneled 
door all attesting his refined and excellent 
taste. To this hall Tennyson makes reference 
in 'In Memoriam' as that in which the family 
were wont to gather on festive occasions, and, 
doubtless, its old walls full many a time 'with 
harp and carol rang,' more especially at Christ- 
mas, when the poet and his brothers came 
down from Cambridge, accompanied by some 
of their college friends, to spend the vacation 
at Somersby: 

'As in the winters left behind, 

Again our ancient games had place, 
The mimic picture's breathing grace, 

And dance and song and hoodman-blind.' 

Such scenes of mirth and merrymaking were 
not always suited to the poet's habits of soli- 
tude — manifest even at this early age — and 
oftener than elsewhere was he to be found 
alone with his books in his study in the attic. 

i73 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

A private stair, rather dark and difficult to 
climb, leads up to it from the ground floor; 
but the sanctuary of the Muse is strangely- 
altered, and the lines the poet addressed to it — 

'O darling room, my heart's delight, 
Dear room, the apple of my sight, 



No little room so warm and bright, 
Wherein to read, wherein to write' — ■ 

would hardly describe it now, as the books 
which lined the walls and gave to it such a 
cheerful look have been superseded by 'Lin- 
colnshire pictures.' The skylight has been 
closed in, and now only one window in the 
gable wall greets the day, the view from it 
embracing a wide prospect over the wolds. 

"Our chief interest, however, centers in the 
room in which the poet was born. It is over 
the drawing-room, and is distinguishable by 
the iron balcony in front of its windows, but the 
aspect of the interior is greatly changed, owing 
to the furniture being altogether different from 
that of eighty years ago. Standing in this 
room, our thoughts naturally travel back over 
the years to that memorable day when the 
roofs above heard the poet's 'earliest cry.' 
Somersby would then be at its loveliest, for the 
Laureate was born on what Charles Lamb 

174 



SOMERSBY 

would call 'an all-day day' in August, that 
charming month when summer, falling into 
the lap of autumn, 'gilds the glebe of England.' 
Little would his parents think that to their 
house had just been born an 'heir of endless 
fame,' yet it was so." 

Other children came into this country par- 
sonage, ten in all, six sons and four daughters, 
"most of them more or less true poets," "a 
nest of nightingales" some one styled the house- 
hold. Frederick, the eldest, who had been born 
at Louth, published three volumes of poetry, 
"Days and Hours," "The Isles of Greece," 
and "Daphne." Three other sons, Edward, Sep- 
timus, and Horatio, the youngest, wrote verses 
which would have received much greater con- 
sideration had there not been other more re- 
markable verse-makers in the family. Charles, 
a year older than the best known of the 
brothers, the only one who followed in his 
father's steps and became a clergyman, and 
who, like his father, spent his life in a country 
parish, when at Cambridge wrote such de- 
cidedly good poetry that he won the approval 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and later in life, 
when vicar of Grasby, wrote many beautiful 
sonnets, in all of which, as in Keble's poems, 
there breathes a "Saviour-tone of love." 

i75 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

The rector of Somersby was greatly blessed 
in his family, and the sons and daughters of 
that rectory wonderfully blessed the world. 
There has long been a slander abroad that par- 
sonage children do not turn out well. As far 
back as the middle of the seventeenth century, 
when Thomas Fuller wrote his "History of the 
Worthies of England," he took notice of it. 
"There goeth a common report," he says, "no 
less uncharitable than untrue, yet meeting with 
many believers thereof, as if clergymen's sons 
were generally unfortunate, like the sons of 
Eli, Hophni, and Phinehas, dissolute in their 
lives and doleful in their deaths." It has been 
repeated many times since his day, and by 
many people, and loses nothing of its un- 
charitableness or untruthfulness in the repe- 
tition. And no matter what one may say in 
disproof the lusty snake will still crawl its 
slimy way through the land. The fact is the 
parsonages of Christian countries have made 
a larger contribution of genius, ability, skill 
to the progress of the world than any other 
class of homes. So large, indeed, has been this 
contribution of our country parsonages, for 
example, that the author of a book concerning 
the clergy of a certain county in Connecticut, 
speaking of their children, says: "I have no 

176 



.... 

'■'"■■■I ""■:-;■"*:: J*. ^ "i-'MJ^ ^ ■/■ ,., ' :■:■ '" \ A .W '-K "' ■' ' , 



, 




ROOM IN WHICH TENNYSON WAS BORN 




ROAD PASSING SOMERSBY RECTORY 



SOMERSBY 

doubt that if all the facts could be properly- 
collected and presented, so that all might 
know what the world owes to the children of 
ministers, the public would be glad to pay the 
life salaries of country ministers for the sake 
of this product alone, and that great philan- 
thropists would be eager to provide the means 
for educating the children of all country pas- 
tors." "It is possible, however," he adds, 
"that in this way clerical life would be made 
so much easier and more luxurious that the 
family fiber would be weakened and deteriorate 
in quality." And this is quite possible. Among 
the parsonage children of that celebrated county 
were the six ministerial sons of Dr. Lyman 
Beecher, including Thomas K. Beecher and 
Henry Ward Beecher, and a daughter, Harriet 
Beecher St owe, who achieved no less distinc- 
tion and won as large an immortality. "She 
has done more for humanity," said Lord Cock- 
burn, "than was ever before accomplished by 
any single book of fiction." Charlotte Bronte 
likewise was born in a country parsonage and 
married a country minister. Frances Haver- 
gal's father was the rector of a small parish in 
Astley, in Worcestershire. "And," interjects 
the Lady, with characteristic enthusiasm, 
"don't forget Jane Austen, or Dinah Mulock, 

177 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

or Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, or Elizabeth Pay- 
son Prentiss. And when you are telling about 
the daughters of the manse you surely ought 
to mention Abigail Adams, the wife of the 
second President of the United States, and 
Abigail Fillmore, and you mustn't leave out of 
the list Anna Cairns, or Sarah Porter, or Mary 
Wooley, who have done so much for the edu- 
cation of girls, or Rudyard Kipling's mother, 
who was born in a Staffordshire parsonage, or 
Robert Moffat's daughter, who married David 
Livingstone, or the many other heroines who 
have gone to the rescue of women in heathen 
lands, or — ," but just at this point I inter- 
rupted her with the perfectly natural observa- 
tion that there are some sons of the parsonage, 
a few at least, who have won fame. And 
among those I named were Lowell and Park- 
man, and Bancroft, and Holmes, and Emerson 
— a very respectable group, by the way. 
"But," she objected, "they were the sons of 
city ministers," which was true. Well, then 
being put to it, I told her of Joseph Addison, 
whose father was rector of Milson, the living 
being worth only one hundred and twenty 
pounds a year; Louis Agassiz, who was born 
in the village of Motier, on the Lake of Morat, 
in Switzerland, as the tablet above the par- 

178 



SOMERSBY 

sonage door records; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 
whose father was a Church of England country 
parson, as were also William Cowper's, and 
Richard Blackmore's, and Dean Stanley's, and 
Sir Joshua Reynolds's. And I told her further 
that quite as formidable an American list 
could be given, and that it would include such 
distinguished names as John Hancock, first 
signer of the Declaration of Independence; 
Jonathan Edwards, preacher and theologian; 
Nathaniel Greene, of Revolutionary fame; Mark 
Hopkins, educator; John B. Gordon, soldier 
and statesman; Henry Clay, born at "The 
Slashes," a country community in Virginia, 
where his father was a Baptist preacher; Jus- 
tice Brewer, Senator Dolliver, Justice Hughes, 
and Richard Watson Gilder, editor and poet, 
and a whole host of bankers, statesmen, preach- 
ers, lawyers, physicians, philanthropists, less 
well known, perhaps, but not less worthy. No, 
it's not true that the children of our parsonages 
"turn out bad," at least, it would not seem so, 
for time would fail one to tell of the innumer- 
able company of parsonage children who have 
come to worthy fame, or, working in less con- 
spicuous ways, have done equal honor to their 
parentage. 

Why should it be thought surprising that the 
179 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

parsonages of a nation prove "to be a soil so 
prolific of learning and virtue and patriotic 
devotion"? Where else is there a type of do- 
mestic life more favorable to the growth of 
noble ideals and worthy purposes? Where is 
the religious life more exalted? Where are the 
Holy Scriptures more faithfully read? Amid 
what surroundings, what influences, what ex- 
amples of self-sacrifice could children be better 
taught? Look at that Somersby rectory, which 
was home and school and church all in one. 
The father was parent, teacher, and priest; 
the mother was an unfailing source of sym- 
pathy, love, inspiration and aspiration, and the 
children increased in wisdom and stature and 
in favor with God and man. In one of the 
books of Lord Tennyson's childhood, his son 
found an unfinished prayer, written in a very 
boyish hand, beginning: "O Lord God Almighty, 
high above all height, Omniscient and Omni- 
present, Whose lifetime is eternity, wilt Thou 
condescend to behold from the throne of Thy 
inexpressible Majesty the work of Thine own 
Hands kneeling before Thee? Thou art the 
God of Heaven and of Earth. Thou hast 
created the immeasurable sea. Thou hast laid 
the foundations of the world that it should not 
be moved for ever. Thou givest and Thou 

1 80 




SOMERSBY CHURCH 




BAG-ENDERBY CHURCH 



SOMERSBY 

takest life, Thou destroy est and Thou renewest. 
Blessed be Thy name for ever and ever," and 
concluding with an appeal for pity to Christ — 
"Who did leave the right hand of the Father to 
endure the agonies of the crown of thorns," 
and "of the cross." The religious influences of 
that Somersby home were always potent in his 
life and in his work, for he was not only a 
Christian poet — Stopford Brooke calls him "dis- 
tinctly Christian" — but he was ever a re- 
ligious poet. Much of the time he was essen- 
tially a preacher. With his knowledge of and 
love for the Bible which he had gained at 
home he could hardly do otherwise than 
preach religion. His writings are literally 
saturated with the Scriptures. There are in 
them more than three hundred direct refer- 
ences to the Bible. His letters are full of 
scriptural passages and allusions. When he 
was sick he talked about the book of Job, 
which he considered one of the greatest of 
books, and then asked for Saint John, the 
"little-children -love-one-another" passage, and 
the Sermon on the Mount. As he approached 
death he read from Job and then from Saint 
Matthew's Gospel. "That my father was a 
student of the Bible," this' is his son's testi- 
mony, "those who have read 'In Memoriam' 

181 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

know. He hoped that the Bible would be 
more and more studied by all ranks of people, 
and expounded simply by their teachers, for 
he maintained that the religion of people could 
never be founded on mere moral philosophy, 
and that it could come home to them only in 
the simple, noble thoughts and facts of a 
Scripture like ours." Holiness of life he re- 
garded as the goal of every man. A friend 
tells how once when walking with him over the 
blooming heath above Haslemere they were 
speaking of the problems of life, and he ven- 
tured to say that he thought education was the 
key to much that was perplexing. Tennyson 
assented, stood for a moment in thought, and 
then broke out into the lines, then unpub- 
lished : 

"God let the house of a beast to the soul of a man; 
Said the man, 'Am I your debtor?' 
'No,' said the Lord — 'make it clean if you can, 
And then I'll give you a better.' " 

He believed in God profoundly — in a living, lov- 
ing God. Once when he was wandering with his 
son through Westminster Abbey, and they had 
climbed up into the chantry, and the sound of 
the organ and the voices of the choristers roll- 
ing through the vast spaces came to their ears, 
Tennyson exclaimed, with much feeling, "It is 

182 



SOMERSBY 

beautiful, but what empty and awful mockery 
if there were no God!" He believed in a di- 
vine, beneficent providence, in the efficacy of 
prayer, and in immortality. 

There is a picture which Tennyson draws 
with exquisite skill and finest feeling, and 
which is regarded as among the most beautiful 
passages in literature dealing with the mystery 
of death, and at the same time showing with 
attractiveness the happiness of an unquestion- 
ing faith in Him who alone of men has solved 
the riddle and knows the answer. It is that 
description of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, 
after Jesus had restored her brother to her, 
beginning: 

"Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, 
No other thought her mind admits 
But, he was dead, and there he sits, 
And He who brought him back is there." 

Yet I have not thought to make this a study 
of Tennyson as a religious poet, but rather to 
suggest the significance of the home influences 
and surroundings in the fashioning of his life 
and in the determining of the nature and value 
of his writings. All his life Tennyson was de- 
votedly attached to the place where he spent 
the early and formative years of his notable 
life. Once, when returning from a tour in 

183 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Switzerland, he received some Somersby vio- 
lets from the little daughter of the patron of 
his father's living, and he wrote the child's 
mother from a heart which had been deeply 
stirred by the fragrant blossoms: "Nothing 
could be sweeter than Cathy's Somersby vio- 
lets, and doubt not but that I shall keep them 
as a sacred treasure. The violets of one's own 
native place, gathered by the hands of a pure, 
innocent child, must needs be precious to me, 
and, indeed, I would have acknowledged the 
receipt of them and sent her a thousand loves 
and kisses before now, but there were several 
reasons why I did not write, which it is of no 
use troubling you with; only I pray you kiss 
her for me very sweetly on lip and cheek and 
forehead, and assure her of my gratitude. I 
love all children, but I loved little Cathy par 
excellence by a kind of instinct when I saw 
her first." 

He did not visit Somersby for many years 
toward the close of his life — there were rea- 
sons for this — and it has been broadly hinted 
that he had lost interest in his native district, 
but Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, 
his lifelong friend, says that in those last 
years he talked much of his boyhood days in 
the country rectory, and Tennyson's brother 

184 



SOMERSBY 

remarked that the man who wrote "Tears, 
Idle Tears," could never forget Somersby. 
Read these lines and form your own opinion: 

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more. 

"Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, 
That brings our friends up from the underworld 
Sad as the last which reddens over one 
That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 

"Dear as remember' d kisses after death, 
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign 'd 
On lips that are for others ; deep as love, 
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; 
O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 

In 1874 Tennyson received a letter from 
a Somersby lad, the son of an old Somersby 
bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer, who had 
crossed the Atlantic years before and was liv- 
ing in Missouri. He was about the poet's age, 
and his frank, cordial letter concerning the 
early Somersby home of the Tennysons, where 

185 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

his father and he had worked for "the good 
Doctor," greatly interested and delighted Lord 
Tennyson. "I can just now see the apple 
trees that bore such fine yellow apples," the 
boyhood acquaintance wrote, "the broad lawn 
where some boys, whom I wot of, used to 
astonish me by coming out on with those 
wondrous gauze helmets and long foils, and I 
was afraid mischief would be done. You were 
not very broad-shouldered then, I remember. 
Do you remember the Siberian crab tree down 
the garden, the old Scotch firs at the house- 
end where the rooks used to build, and those 
tiny bantams that made their home over the 
oven, and the handsome cock who was burned 
to death? I remember one Good Friday we 
were working for the Doctor. I see him coming, 
and hear him saying, 'Atkinson, you must 
leave work and go to church,' and I remember 
he preached from 'As Moses lifted up the 
serpent,' the first time I had ever heard it as a 
text, and that is near fifty years ago. Ah, 
sir! perhaps no man in America knows as well 
as I where you first heard the wrens twitter, 
the blackbirds, thrushes, the robins sing." 

Many of his poems were inspired by scenes 
and incidents connected with Somersby, and 
the Somersby atmosphere is felt in all his 

1 86 




ENTRANCE COURT KING S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 




TOWERS OF THE CHAPEL OF KING S COLLEGE 



SOMERSBY 

poems. The beautiful parish church enters 
into several of them, and one entitled "The 
Two Voices" describes a scene which the poet 
must have frequently witnessed as his father's 
parishioners assembled for worship. It was in 
a Lincolnshire lane, at five in the morning, 
"between blooming hedges," that this song of 
the sea was written : 

"Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 

"O well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play 
O well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay. 

"And the stately ships go on 

To their haven under the hill ; 
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still! 

"Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me." 

His love for the sea was always strong. From 
boyhood he had a passion for it, and "espe- 
cially for the North Sea in wild weather — 

'The hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts;' 

and for the glorious sunsets over the flats — 

'The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh.' " 
187 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

His parents took their holidays by the seaside, 
and the cottage to which the family resorted 
was close under the sea bank, "the long low 
line of tussocked dunes." "I used to stand on 
this sand-built ridge," the poet said, "and 
think that it was the spine-bone of the world." 
"From the top of this, the immense sweep of 
marsh inland and the whole weird strangeness 
of the place greatly moved him." His delight 
in the sea comes out in such poems as "Enoch 
Arden," "Ulysses," "The Revenge," "The 
Voyage," "The Sailor Boy," "Sea Dreams," 
"Maud," and "Crossing the Bar." On the 
other hand, " 'The May Queen' is all Lincoln- 
shire inland, as 'Locksley Hall' is its seaboard." 
Some years ago an American student of Tenny- 
son wrote to the present rector of Somersby to 
ask what hamlets were referred to in the poem 
which tells of the poet's hearing the Christmas 
bells ringing from four of the neighboring 
churches : 

"The time draws near the birth of Christ: 
The moon is hid; the night is still; 
The Christmas bells from hill to hill 
Answer each other in the mist. 

"Four voices of four hamlets round 

From far and near, on mead and moor 
Swell out and fail, as if a door 
Were shut between me and the sound." 



SOMERSBY 

When inquiry was made of Tennyson he had 
forgotten, but thought there could be no doubt 
that one of the four was Bag-Enderby, which 
is only a half mile distant from Somersby, and 
a part of the parish. 

Edward FitzGerald, who was an intimate 
friend of Tennyson for many beautiful years, 
said more than once that the poet never should 
have left Lincolnshire, "where there were not 
only such good seas, but also such fine hill and 
dale among 'The Wolds' which he was brought 
up in, as people in general scarce thought on." 
But there was no alternative. His father had 
died in 1831, and for six years the family had 
been allowed to continue in the rectory. Dur- 
ing this period sorrow upon sorrow came upon 
them. Arthur Hallam, the poet's dearest 
friend, and the accepted lover of his sister, 
died suddenly in Vienna in 1833. There were 
anxieties as to resources and the like, and then 
came the departure from Somersby in 1837. 
How keenly the poet felt the going away may 
be seen from the verses he wrote about this 
time. "One can picture him ascending the 
hill behind the house, and taking a last look 
at the familiar landscape, or straying down 
the garden walks and calling back to memory 
the time when he first heard a voice speaking 

189 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

to him in the wind, and his earliest attempts 
at poetry, when his brother Charles put a 
slate into his hand and asked him to write 
something about the flowers in the garden. 
But now, alas! 

' Unwatch'd the garden bough shall sway, 
The tender blossom nutter down, 
Unloved, that beech will gather brown, 
This maple burn itself away; 

' Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, 
Ray round with flames her disk of seed, 
And many a rose-carnation feed 
With summer spice the humming air.' 

Nor is the little brook which runs at the foot 
of the garden, and which occurs so often in his 
poems, forgotten in these musings, and, hear- 
ing, perhaps, its sounds, he continues: 

' Unloved, by many a sandy bar, 

The brook shall babble down the plain, 
At noon or when the lesser wain 
Is twisting round the polar star; 



'Till from the garden and the wild 
A fresh association blow, 
And year by year the landscape grow 
Familiar to the stranger's child.' " 

He was at this time engaged to dear Emily 
Sellwood, but his financial condition would not 
permit them to marry, and it was not until 

190 




CLEVEDON CHURCH 




POET S CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY 



SOMERSBY 

more than twelve years had passed that his 
income was sufficient to warrant the establish- 
ing of a new home with her, to whom in the 
dedication of "Enoch Arden" he refers as 

"Dear, near and true — no truer Time himself 
Can prove you, tho' he make you evermore 
Dearer and nearer." 

In a letter which he wrote her the year follow- 
ing the departure from Somersby there is this 
pretty reference to the old home and never-to- 
be-forgotten hours there: "I saw from the high 
road thro' Hagworthingham the tops of the 
elms on the lawn at Somersby beginning to 
kindle into green. Do you remember sitting 
with me there on the iron garden chair one 
day when I had just come from London? It 
was earlier in the year than now. I have no 
reason for asking, except that the morning 
three years back seems fresh and pleasant; 
and you were in a silk pelisse, and I think I 
read some book with you." 

It was here at Somersby that he had first 
met the young woman, then a girl of seventeen, 
who wore the "silk pelisse. " Tennyson was 
twenty-one — it was in 1830, while he was still at 
Cambridge, and the year before his father died 
— and while walking in the Fairy Wood, not far 
from the parsonage-house, he saw through the 

191 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

trees, coming toward him, his friend Arthur 
Hallam walking with a young woman, "slender, 
beautiful, dressed in gray." From that mo- 
ment the poet was no longer fancy free. This 
young woman who took Tennyson captive was 
Emily Sell wood. It has been remarked as 
more than a coincidence perhaps that Hallam 
brought to his friend before he left him the one 
who was to take his place, to fill the vacant 
heart, and satisfy the longings which death 
disappointed. There was no avowal of love for 
several years, and many more were to elapse 
before the marriage took place, but twenty 
years from the time he first saw that gleaming 
vision in the Fairy Wood he led the bride of 
his heart to the altar, and as Tennyson said many 
years later, "The peace of God came into my 
life before the altar when I wedded her." This 
was in June, 1850. "In Memorianr" was pub- 
lished that same month. The poet's fortunes 
were improving in more senses than one. His 
home life was wondrously beautiful now. "For 
five and forty years they lived together in the 
peace of God. Whenever he was away he wrote 
a letter-diary to her ; whenever he was at home 
she was his home. From that happy day at 
Shiplake he was like a mariner who had entered 
port, like the traveler of his own brilliant 

192 



SOMERSBY 

imagination, who had found the happy Isles. 
The loyalty which waited twenty years was 
rewarded with the fruition of forty-five." In 
his last volume the devoted husband-poet in- 
cluded a love-song, which he tried to disguise 
with the title "June bracken and heather," 
addressed "To ": 

"There on the top of the down, 

The wild heather round me and over me June's high 
blue, 
When I looked at the bracken so bright and the heather 
so brown, 
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you. 
This, and my love together, 

To you that are seventy-seven, 

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue 
heaven, 
And a fancy as summer-new 
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the 
heather." 

Their first home was at Warninglid, Sussex, 
from which they soon moved to a house in 
Twickenham, and in 1852 to Farringford, a 
house on the Isle of Wight, concerning which 
Mrs. Tennyson wrote in her journal: "This 
ivied home among the pine trees is ours. Such 
beautiful blue hyacinths, orchises, primroses, 
daisies, marsh marigolds, and cuckoo flowers! 
Wild cherry trees, too, with single snowy 
blossom, and the hawthorns white with their 

i93 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

pearls of May. The park has for many days 
been rich with cowslips and furze in bloom. 
The elms are a golden wreath at the foot of the 
down, to the north of the house the mespilus 
and horse chestnut are in flower and the apple 
trees are covered with rosy buds. A. dug the 
bed ready for the rhododendrons. A thrush 
was singing among the nightingales and other 
birds, as he said, 'mad with joy.' At sunset, 
the golden green of the trees, the burning 
splendor of Blackgang Chine and St. Cath- 
erine's, and the red bank of the primeval 
view, contrasted with the turkis blue of the 
sea (that is our view from the drawing room) ; 
make altogether a miracle of beauty. We are 
glad that Farringford is ours." Here for two- 
score years they lived together in the peace 
of God, and here, as the monument to their 
memory in the quiet churchyard near by 
reads, their "happiest days were passed." 

But throughout his life he was always living 
over the Somersby days. One who lived with 
him bears witness that "he always spoke of 
Somersby with an affectionate remembrance; 
of the woodbine that climbed into the bay 
window of his nursery; of the Gothic- vaulted 
dining-room with stained-glass windows, mak- 
ing, as my uncle Charles Turner used to say, 

194 




STOCKWORTH MILL 




FARRINGFORD 



SOMERSBY 

'butterfly souls' on the walls; of the beautiful 
stone chimney-piece carved by his father; of 
the pleasant little drawing-room lined with 
bookshelves, and furnished with yellow cur- 
tains, sofas and chairs, and looking out on the 
lawn. This lawn was overshadowed on one 
side by wych-elms, and on the other by larch 
and sycamore trees. Here, my father said, he 
made his early song, 'A spirit haunts the year's 
last hours.' Beyond the path, bounding the 
green sward to the south, ran in the old days a 
deep border of lilies and roses, backed by holly- 
hocks and sunflowers. Beyond that was 

'A garden bower'd close 
With plaited alleys of the trailing rose, 
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots, 
Or opening upon level plots 
Of crowned lilies, standing near 
Purple-spiked lavender' — 

sloping in a gradual descent to the parson's 
field, at the foot of which flows, by 'lawn and 
lea,' the swift, steep-banked brook, where are 
'brambley wildernesses' and 'sweet forget-me- 
nots,' and in which the long mosses sway.' 
The charm and beauty of this brook, 

'That loves 
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 

195 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

And swerves to left and right thro' meadowy curves 
That feed the mothers of the flock,' 

haunted him through life. Near Somersby the 
stream joins another from Holywell, and their 
confluence may be referred to in the lines: 

' By that old bridge, which, half in ruins then, 
Still makes a hoary eyebrow for the gleam 
Beyond it, where the waters marry.' 

" 'Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea' was 
the poem more especially dedicated to the 
Somersby stream, and not, as some have sup- 
posed, 'The Brook, ' which is designed to be a 
brook of the imagination. 

"The orchard on the right of the lawn forms 
a sunny little spot that awoke in his mind 
pleasant memories. 'How often,' he said, 'have 
I risen in the early dawn to see the golden 
globes lying in the dewy grass among those 
apple trees.' He delighted, too, to recall the 
rare richness of the bowery lanes; the ancient 
Norman cross standing in the churchyard, 
close to the door of the quaint little church; 
the wooded hollow of Holywell ; the cold springs 
flowing from under the sandstone rocks; the 
flowers, the mosses, and the ferns." Hallam 
Tennyson adds: "The localities of my father's 
subject poems are wholly imaginary; although 

196 



SOMERSBY 

he has done for mid-Lincolnshire scenery what 
Virgil did for Mantua, yet his early surround- 
ings certainly did give color to his early and 
later work." None the less pilgrims to Som- 
ersby will continue to relate some of Tenny- 
son's poems to particular places in that region. 
For example, while Tennyson himself says that 
the mill of which he wrote in "The Miller's 
Daughter" was no particular mill, more than 
one visitor to Somersby has felt certain that it 
was a mill not far from Tennyson's early home 
which gave him his first suggestion of the sub- 
ject, for, as Napier says, while the poem was 
probably written at Cambridge, there are several 
touches in it, such as the reference to the wolds 
and the white chalk quarry, which seem to in- 
dicate that, consciously or unconsciously, the 
haunts of his boyhood were present in the 
poet's mind wherever he wrote it. 

"The little stream which runs along the 
happy valley of Somersby turns the wheels of 
no less than three mills, and in the poet's 
youthful days it supplied a fourth with water. 
This last was almost within a stone's cast of 
his father's rectory, and here the poet, when 
a child, would watch 

'The sleepy pool above the dam, 
The pool beneath it never still.' 

197 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

This mill has long ago disappeared, and the 
nearest to Somersby is now that called Stock- 
worth, in the parish of Hagworthingham. As 
the distance does not exceed two miles, it is 
not beyond the limits of conjecture, knowing, 
as we do, that the poet's favorite walk was by 
the banks of the brook, to imagine that in some 
of those afternoon strolls, so beautifully de- 
scribed in 'In Memoriam,' he and his friend 
would often turn their steps hitherward, espe- 
cially as it is one of the sweetest spots in all the 
surrounding country." 

With this last glimpse of the poet and Arthur 
Hallam walking arm in arm through the fields 
and along the grassy banks of the brook we 
leave Somersby. They had first met at Trinity 
College, which, with Saint John's and King's, 
excel all other colleges at Cambridge for 
beauty of situation. These closely adjoin one 
another, and their halls and quadrangles, 
cloisters and chapels, fountains and beautiful 
pleasure parks, through which under many a 
bridge the river Cam quietly glides, form as 
pleasant a retreat for the pursuit of knowledge 
as is to be found all the world over. Here to- 
gether they walked and rowed — and loved one 
another with a love passing that of women. 
How infinitely pathetic are these lines which 

198 




SAINT JOHN S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 




THE CAM, CAMBRIDGE 



SOMERSBY 

Tennyson wrote after a visit to the old familiar 
scenes and to "the rooms in which he dwelt": 

"I past beside the reverend walls 
In "which of old I wore the gown ; 
I roved at random through the town, 
And saw the tumult of the halls ; 

"And heard once more in college fanes 

The storm their high-built organs make, 
And thunder-music, rolling, shake 
The prophet blazon 'd on the panes; 

"And caught once more the distant shout, 
The measured pulse of racing oars 
Among the willows; paced the shores 
And many a bridge, and all about 

"The same gray flats again, and felt 

The same, but not the same; and last 
Up that long walk of limes I past 
To see the rooms in which he dwelt." 

Hallam is buried in a lonely church, near Cleve- 
don, in Somersetshire, not a hundred yards 
from the sea. Tennyson sleeps his last sleep in 
a grave in the Poets' Corner in Westminster 
Abbey, below the monument to Chaucer and 
beside the grave of Robert Browning. Hallam 
died in the twenty-third year of his age, "too 
early lost for public fame." Tennyson jour- 
neyed a long road to "sunset and evening star" 
before he "put out to sea," dyfng at eighty-three, 
rich in honors and in the affection of men. 

199 



EVERSLEY 

"Eversley?" replied the station-master at 
Winchfield to the query of two lone trav- 
elers who had stepped from a London and 
Southwestern train early one summer morning, 
"Eversley? Oh, that's about five miles, sir." 
"How can you get there? You'll have to drive, 
sir." "The price? I think it is six-and-six, sir." 
We discovered on our return, however, when 
there was not a moment for argument, if we 
would catch the train we had planned to take, 
that the price given was for one way only. 

The station-master was still waiting, hat in 
hand. "Will you 'ave an hopen trap, sir?" 
he asks, as he starts down the street to the 
hostelry for the conveyance. "We'd rather 
ride in an open trap than any other kind of 
a vehicle," we tell him, and so the journey 
is made in a "trap," in more senses than one, 
but that sad story of duplicity must not be 
permitted to mar for the briefest instant 
even the memory of a visit to the scene 
of the labors of Charles Kingsley, preacher, 
poet, novelist, reformer, naturalist, and parish 
priest. 

200 



EVERSLEY 

From the station along a winding road, 
underneath arching trees, as if through a park, 
past a mile stone with the inscription "From 
London 38 miles," we were driven. Soon the 
sun, which had been hidden all the morning, came 
out, and the shadows beautifully embroidered 
on the earth's carpet were golden flowers. We 
pass through Phenix Green, which is the begin- 
ning of Hartley Row, and now we are on the 
direct route, the old coach road, to London- 
town. "To Eversley, Blackwater, and London" 
a sign-post reads, and we follow the pointing 
finger through the small villages of Hartley 
Wintney and Hartford Bridge, then leave the 
main road for a short drive between Lord 
Calthorpe's estate on the right — "It extends 
for miles," the driver said — and Sir Anthony 
Cope's famous estate on the left, where ex- 
tensive forest fires had then been burning 
with irreparable damage for three weeks, to 
Eversley. 

"This isn't the place, is it?" asked the Lady, 
who had long been interested in Charles Kings- 
ley's parish, as we stood in the little churchyard 
and looked up at the almost diminutive church. 
"This can't have been his church." But it was. 
Even then we were standing by his grave. Here 
in this country church he preached for thirty- 

201 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

three years, here in this country parish he lived, 
and here in this churchyard he sleeps, 

"A righteous man 
Who loved God and truth above all things. 
A man of untarnished honor — 
Loyal and chivalrous — gentle and strong — 
Modest and humble — tender and true — 
Pitiful to the weak — yearning after the erring — 
Stern to all forms of wrong and oppression, 
Yet most stern toward himself — 
Who being angry, yet sinned not. 
Whose highest virtues were known only 
To his wife, his children, his servants, and the poor. 
Who lived in the presence of God here, 
And passing through the grave and gate of death 
Now liveth unto God for evermore." 

Charles Kingsley was born in 1819 in a coun- 
try parsonage in Devonshire, "under the brow 
of Dartmoor." His father was a clergyman, 
a man of scholarly tastes and acquirements, 
having been educated at Harrow and Oxford. 
And his mother, born in the West Indies, but 
educated in England, was a woman of re- 
markable talents. It is told of her that she was 
keenly alive to the charms of scenery. She 
believed that all impressions made on her own 
mind before the birth of her child by the ro- 
mantic surroundings of her Devonshire home 
would be transmitted to him, and in this faith 
she surrendered herself to the enjoyment of 

202 



EVERSLEY 

every sight and sound which she hoped would 
be dear to her child in after life, and her faith 
and imagination were abundantly rewarded, for 
Charles Kingsley all his life was a lover of 
God's beautiful world. A country parish was 
no hardship to him — far from it. "Village life 
is so dull," says the man of the town. Kingsley 
never found it so. He loved the moors, wide 
stretches of landscape, and particularly the 
open sea. This love of the sea he acquired in 
boyhood, his father, when Charles was eleven, 
having been presented to the rectory of 
Clovelly, "decidedly the quaintest and perhaps 
the most beautiful village in all England," on 
the southwest coast, just where the coast line 
begins to sweep down toward Land's End. 
That is an unusually graphic description which 
Dickens gives in his "A Message from the 
Sea" of the wonderful little village, rising cot- 
tage above cottage along the single street, or 
stairway, which ascends sharply from out the 
sea. In more recent years artists and writers 
have made better known the beauties of the 
unique place, which Kingsley late in life de- 
clared to be of all the places at home and 
abroad the one he most admired. Tennyson 
thought it one of the most beautiful places he 
had ever seen. It was here in Clovelly that "a 

203 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

new education began for Kingsley; a new world 
was revealed to him," and here as nowhere else 
the mystery, romance, and power of the sea 
laid hold upon his imagination. The life at 
Clovelly influenced his entire career. His well- 
known song of "The Three Fishers" was born 
of his Clovelly experiences. There were boy- 
hood scenes which were ever rising before him, 
such as, for example, the oft-repeated sight, 
when, as the herring fleet was about to put to 
sea, his father would take him to the quay, 
where this faithful pastor of souls would hold 
a short parting service with the fearless men 
and the weeping women, all joining in singing 
with the fervor of those "who have death and 
danger staring them in the face" the one hun- 
dred and twenty-first psalm, which has long 
been known as the "Traveler's Psalm," which 
Livingstone read to his family before he left 
for Africa, and which many others have been 
accustomed to use before setting out upon a 
journey: 

"Up to those bright and gladsome hills, 
Whence flows my weal and mirth, 
I look and sigh for Him who fills 
Unseen both heaven and earth." 

These boyhood days helped to make the 
chivalric Kingsley. There are some impres- 

204 




clovelly: the main street 




THE SEA AT CLOVELLY 



EVERSLEY 

sions which we never grow away from, and 
which help to fashion our course to the very- 
end of life's day. Kingsley always loved 
Clovelly. His wife says that his affection for 
this fisher-village amounted to a passion. 
Kingsley himself said that it was the inspira- 
tion of his life until he met her. One summer, 
broken down by his pastoral labors, he spent 
a month in "his beloved Clovelly," and such 
rapturous letters as he wrote home! "My 
room is about twelve feet square, on the first 
floor, a jessamine and a fuchsia running up the 
windows. . . . The bay is now curling and 
writhing in white horses under a smoking 
southwester, which promises a blessing, as it 
will drive the mackerel off the Welsh shore, 
where they now are in countless millions, into 
our bay; and then fun and food for me and 
the poor fellows here." "We had a charming 
trip yesterday to Lundy; started at six, and 
were five hours going over, the wind being very 
light; but we went along very pleasantly to a 
continued succession of Wesleyan hymns, sung 
in parts most sweetly. . . . Coming back, 
as the sun set behind the island, great flame- 
colored sheets of rack flared up into the black 
sky from off the black line of the island top; 
and when the sun set the hymns began again, 

205 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

and we slipped on home, while every ripple of 
the cutter's bow fell down, and ran along the 
surface in flakes and sparkles of emerald fire; 
and then the breeze died, and we crawled under 
our own huge cliffs, through a fiery sea, among 
the dusky herring boats, for whom and their nets 
we had to keep strict watch, and landed, still 
through fire, at half past two in the morning." 
But the lad had other teachers than "iron 
walls of rock," "tiny herring-fleets," and "gray 
columns of waterspouts, stalking across the 
waves before the northern gale." His father 
was his earliest instructor. Later he went 
to King's College, London, and in the fall of 
1838 to Magdalen College, Cambridge. When 
he was twenty-two God laid his hand upon 
him in a way which brooked no refusal. For a 
long time the brilliant student had been strug- 
gling with doubts, and had been undetermined 
as to his life work, but God called him to the 
ministry, and when the struggle was over 
Kingsley wrote, under date of June 12: "My 
birth night. I have been for the last hour on 
the seashore, not dreaming, but thinking 
deeply and strongly, and forming determina- 
tions which are to affect my destiny through 
time and through eternity. Before the sleep- 
ing earth and the sleepless sea and stars, I 

206 



EVERSLEY 

have devoted myself to God; a vow never (if 
he gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled." 
How well Kingsley kept his vow Eversley is 
his witness! 

Kingsley came to Eversley first as curate 
in 1842. "I hope to be ordained in July," he 
had written to Fanny St. Leger, to whom he 
was engaged, "to the curacy of Eversley, in 
Hampshire. In the midst of lovely scenery — 
rich, but not exciting. And you will be with 
me in your thoughts, in my village visits, and 
my moorland walks, when I am drinking in 
from man and nature the good and the beau- 
tiful, while I purge in my vocation the evil, 
and raise up the falling and the faint." 

Five days after his ordination he began his 
public ministrations in the Eversley church — 
which is uninteresting, save that it is Kingsley 's 
church — probably without a thought that he 
would continue to minister to the people of 
that simple country parish throughout an en- 
tire generation. "I wonder if he had any idea 
that he would be here so many years?" asked 
the Lady, as she stood by the altar of the now 
famous church, and thought of the time when 
from all over the world men made their way 
to that out-of-the-way sanctuary to hear 
Charles Kingsley preach. 

207 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

This country parish was made up of three 
small hamlets, "each standing on its own little 
green, surrounded by the moorland, with young 
forests of self-sown fir trees cropping up in 
every direction. The population was scattered 
— 'hethcroppers' from time immemorial and 
poachers by instinct and heritage." "My 
parish is peculiar for nothing," writes the 
village parson, "but want of houses and abun- 
dance of peat bogs; my parishioners remark- 
able only for aversion to education and a 
predeliction for fat bacon." When Kingsley 
began his ministry there was not a grown 
man or woman among the laboring class who 
could read or write. There was no school- 
house near, and as for religious instruction, the 
people had had none. The church was nearly 
empty, the farmers' sheep were pastured in 
the churchyard, the alms were collected in a 
wooden saucer, a cracked basin held the water 
for baptism, holy communion was celebrated 
only three times a year. At the altar, covered 
by a moth-eaten cloth, stood one old broken 
chair, and so averse were the parish authorities 
to any change that when Kingsley proposed 
monthly communions his proposal was ac- 
cepted only on his promising himself to supply 
the wine for the celebration, the church war- 

208 




MAGDALEN COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 




KINGSLEY S COUNTRY PARISH 



EVERSLEY 

dens refusing to provide except for the three 
great festivals. But he was not dismayed. 
Eversley needed him, and, moreover, a beau- 
tiful love was singing in his heart. He makes 
a sketch of the view from the rectory windows 
and sends it to the lady of his love. "Can you 
understand my sketch? I am no drawer of 
trees, but the view is beautiful. The ground 
slopes upward from the windows to a sunk 
fence and road, without banks or hedges, and 
then rises in the furze hill in the drawing, which 
hill is perfectly beautiful in light and shade 
and color. . . . Behind the acacia on the lawn 
you get the first glimpse of the fir forest and 
moors, of which five sixths of my parish con- 
sist. Those delicious self-sown firs! Every 
step I wander they whisper to me of you, the 
delicious past melting into the more delicious 
future. 'What has been, shall be,' they say." 

His influence almost immediately began to be 
felt, and this, not so much at first from his 
preaching, ardent and intense as this was, but 
from his house-to-house visiting during the 
week. This good man never thought that pas- 
toral visiting was a waste of time. He began 
to shepherd his flock as soon as he had been 
made an overseer. "I am going after dinner 
to read to an old woman of eighty-seven. So 

209 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

you see I have begun," he writes in one of his 
earliest letters. To be sure, he was without 
experience, but this did not deter him. "No 
clergyman," he confesses, "knows less about 
the working of a parish than I do; but one 
thing I do know, that I have to preach Jesus 
Christ and him crucified, and to be instant in 
that, in season and out of season, and at all 
risks. . . . And therefore I pray daily for the 
Spirit of love to guide us, and the Spirit of 
earnestness to keep us at work. For our 
work must be done by praying for our people, 
by preaching to them, in church and out of 
church (for all instruction is preaching) — by 
leading them to pray and worship in the 
liturgy, and by setting them an example — an 
example in every look, word, and motion — in 
the paying of a bill, the hiring of a servant, 
the reproving of a child." What a beautiful 
conception of the pastoral office! Such an 
ideal was rare in his day. Among other good 
things, Charles Kingsley taught the clergymen 
of England that a chief duty of Christ's shep- 
herds is to look after the flock. 

In 1844 Kingsley married one whom he had 
met five years before. "That was my real 
wedding day," he remarked some fifteen years 
afterward, so strongly had he been attracted 

210 



EVERSLEY 

that July day of 1839. Their life together was 
always most beautiful, and as the rectory 
became the center of the parish life, the in- 
fluence of that happy home was most beneficent 
in all the region. Perhaps the best description 
of the rectory as it was in Kingsley's day, 
and the family life, is given by William Harri- 
son, who married a daughter of the parsonage, 
and became the rector of Clovelly. "Many, 
now scattered far and wide, must remember 
how picturesque the rectory itself was. Even 
a stranger passing by would have stopped to 
look at the pleasant ivy-grown house, with its 
long, sloping dark roofs, its gables, its bow- 
windows open to sun and air, and its quaint 
mixture of buildings, old and new. And who 
among his friends will ever cease to remem- 
ber the lawn, the glebe land sweeping upward 
toward the half-cultivated, half- wild copse; 
through which the hidden path, henceforth 
forth sacred ground to those who loved him, 
leads up and out to Hartford Bridge flats? 
Marked features in the scene to them, and now 
widely known, were the grand Scotch firs on 
the lawn, under which on summer evenings I 
have seen many sweet pictures, and heard many 
noble words, and the branches of which now 
wave solemnly above his last resting-place. 

211 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

"Here, in this beautiful home-scene, and 
truly ideal English rectory, was the fountain- 
head, as I certainly think, and as he often said, 
of all his strength and greatness. Indeed, 
great as I knew him to be in his books, I found 
him greater at his own fireside. Home was to 
him the sweetest, the fairest, and the most 
romantic thing in life; and there all that was 
best and brightest in him shone with steady and 
purest luster. 

"I should not venture to speak of this, unless 
permission had been granted me to do so, feel- 
ing that it is the most difficult of tasks to lift 
the veil from any family life without lowering 
its sacredness ; and that it is wholly beyond my 
power to preserve in words the living 'sweet- 
ness and light' which pervaded his household. 
That household was indeed a revelation to 
me, as I know it was to others — so nobly 
planned and ordered, so earnest in its central 
depths, so bright upon its surface. 

"Of the wonderful love of that home-life I 
must not, cannot speak. Such things are not 
for the world. And yet for all who wish to 
know what Mr. Kingsley really was, what the 
fashion of his life, and the aims for which he 
worked, not to know that love for those nearest 
and dearest to him was the very lever of his 

212 



EVERSLEY 

life, the very soul of all his joy, would be to 
know him all amiss, and lose the very keynote 
of his being. He has told it all himself to those 
who have ears to hear in every book he wrote, 
and to those who knew him well, his every look 
and every action told the fact yet more em- 
phatically. Some men take pains to conceal 
their love. It seemed his pride to declare it. 
How often has he said to me, and I venture 
to record it because I know he would wish it to 
be recorded, that whatever he had done or 
achieved was due to the love that had come 
to him at a great crisis and to guide and to 
strengthen and to glorify his life." It was all 
so beautiful and so wholesome, and withal so 
like what the sway of every parsonage should 
be that I am constrained to give the words of 
a pupil who lived in the home for a consider- 
able period: "I entered his house as his pupil, 
and was, for nearly a year and a half, his con- 
stant companion. He was then in his thirty- 
first year, in the fullness of his strength; I, a 
raw, receptive schoolboy of fifteen; so that 
his mind and character left their impression 
upon mine as a seal upon wax. He was then, 
above all things and before all things else, a 
parish clergyman. His parish work was not 
indeed so laborious and absorbing as it had 

213 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

been six years before, when he was first made 
rector. The efforts of these six years had told, 
the seed was bearing fruit, and Eversley would 
never again be as it had been. He had now a 
curate to help him, and give him the leisure 
which he needed for writing. Still, even so, 
with a large and straggling, though not very 
populous parish, with his share of three serv- 
ices on Sunday and cottage lectures on two 
week-day evenings in winter, there was much 
for him to do, throwing himself into it, as he 
did, with all his intensity and keen sense of 
responsibility. These were the days when 
farm-laborers in Hampshire got from eight to 
ten shillings a week, and bread was dear, or 
had not long ceased to be so. The cholera of 
1849 had just swept through the country, and 
though it had not reached Eversley, a severe 
kind of low fever had, and there had been a 
season of much illness and many deaths, during 
which he had, by his constant, anxious, tender 
care of the sick poor, won their confidence 
more than ever before. The poor will not go 
to the relieving officer if they can get their needs 
supplied elsewhere; and the Eversley poor 
used to go for relief, and sometimes more than 
relief, to the rectory. There were few morn- 
ings, at that time, that did not bring some one 

214 



EVERSLEY 

in distress, some feeble woman, or ailing child, 
or a summons to a sick-bed. Up to that time 
he had allowed no man or woman in his parish 
to become an inmate of the workhouse through 
infirmity or old age, except in a few cases where 
want had been the direct consequence of indo- 
lence or crime. At times, too, other poor be- 
sides those of his parish might be seen at his 
door. Gypsies were attracted to him from all 
the country round. He married and christened 
many of them, to whom such rites were things 
almost unknown. I cannot give any descrip- 
tion of his daily life, his parish work, which 
will not sound commonplace. . . . But there 
never was a man with whom life was less monot- 
onous, with whom it was more full to over- 
flowing of variety and freshness. Nothing could 
be so exquisitely delightful as a walk with 
him about his parish. Earth, air, and water, 
as well as farmhouse and cottage, seemed full 
of his familiar friends. By day and by night, 
in fair weather and in storm, grateful for heat 
and cold, rain and sunshine, light and soothing 
darkness, he drank in Nature. It seemed as 
if no bird, or beast, or insect, scarcely a drift- 
ing cloud in the sky, passed by him unnoticed, 
unwelcomed. He caught and noted every 
breath, every sound, every sign. With every 

215 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

person he met he instinctively struck some 
point of contact, found something to appre- 
ciate — often, it might be, some information to 
ask for — which left the other cheered, self- 
respecting, raised for the moment above him- 
self; and whatever the passing word might be, 
it was given to high or low, gentle or simple, 
with an appropriateness, a force, and a genial 
courtesy, in the case of all women, a deferential 
courtesy, which threw its spell over all alike, 
a spell which few could resist." 

Kingsley was a lover all his life. He seemed to 
love everything and everybody. His love for 
animals was marked, being "deepened by his 
belief in their having a future state," which he 
held in common with John Wesley, Agassiz, 
Bishop Butler, and many other thoughtful 
men. Dogs were his delight, and Dandy, a 
friend and companion for thirteen years; Sweep, 
a black retriever; and Victor, a gift of Queen 
Victoria, lie buried under the fir trees on the 
rectory lawn. On the same lawn "dwelt a 
family of natter jacks (running toads), who 
lived on from year to year in the same hole, 
which the scythe was never allowed to approach. 
He made friends with a pair of sand wasps, one 
of which he had saved from drowning. They 
lived in a crack of the window of his dressing- 

216 




EVERSLEY CHURCH 




INTERIOR EVERSLEY CHURCH 



EVERSLEY 

room, and every spring he would look out eager- 
ly for them or their children as they came out 
of, or returned to the same crack. The little 
flycatcher, who built its nest every year under 
his bedroom window, was a constant joy to 
him. He had a favorite slowworm in the 
churchyard which parishioners, who thought 
such creatures were poisonous, were warned 
not to kill." The only aversion he had was to 
spiders. Birds were to him, as to Saint Francis, 
among the marvels of creation. He taught his 
children to establish friendly relations with 
bugs, frogs, snakes, and all such creatures, and 
one day his little girl ran into the house, hold- 
ing up a peculiarly repulsive looking worm, 
with the exclamation, "Oh, daddy, look at 
this delightful worm!" 

How, too, he loved nature. This was one of 
the most notable of his characteristics. "He 
had in him, both as a child of nature and a 
naturalist, a form of natural religion and a 
dash of Wordsworthian nature- worship." "Do 
not study matter," he exhorted his people, 
"for its own sake, but as the countenance of 
God!" "Study the sky! Study water! Study 
trees! Study the sounds and scents of nature!" 
"Study the form and colors of leaves and flow- 
ers, and the growth and habits of plants ; not to 

217 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

classify them, but to admire them and to adore 
God!" 

He was full of tender sentiment. "I send you 
some flowers," he writes his wife, "gathered 
yesterday from the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey, 
dismantled by connivance of Henry VIII. 
The forget-me-not is from the high altar, the 
saxifrage from the refectory. To-day I go up 
to lovely Cover, to fish and dream of you. . . . 
Really everyone's kindness here is extreme 
after the stiff South. The richest spot, it is 
said, in all England is this beautiful oasis in the 
mountains. Kiss baby forme. ..." "Didn't 
he say, too," asked the Lady, who was much 
touched by that reference to the forget-me- 
nots, when we were riding back to the station, 
" 'Never lose an opportunity of seeing any- 
thing beautiful. Beauty is God's handwriting, 
a wayside sacrament. Thank him for it, the 
fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in, a cup 
of blessing'? " 

Kingsley did not have many extensive va- 
cations. He kept himself in health and vigor 
by long walks, and now and again a half day's 
fishing in a nearby stream. He was an ardent 
fisherman, and his joy when he took his first 
salmon (he was forty-one at the time) was 
unbounded. "I have done the deed at last — 

218 



EVERSLEY 

killed a real, actual, live salmon, over five 
pounds weight," he writes. "There is nothing 
like it; the excitement is maddening." And 
what respect he had for anyone who was master 
of the art! Take this passage from a letter to 
his dear friend, Tom Hughes, which shows his 
generous appreciation of an angler's skill: "A 
party with doubtful h's, and a commercial 
demeanor, appears on Wednesday on our 
little stream, and kills awfully. Throws a 
beautiful line, and catches more than I have in 
a day for this two years here ; fly, a little green- 
drake, with a ridiculous tufted bright yellow 
wing, like nothing as ever was. Stood aghast; 
went home and dreamed all the spiders' webs 
by the stream were full of them." When he 
could command the time, or particularly felt 
the necessity of the recreation, he went on a 
fishing excursion for a few days, and his periods 
of recreation were almost invariably productive 
of mental fruits as well. His "Chalk Stream 
Studies," especially dear to fishermen, were the 
product of a few days' fishing at Newbury. 
But now and again he was able to take a real 
holiday, and these were occasions of unfeigned 
delight. Almost more than anyone I know, 
Kingsley literally reveled in new scenes and 
bubbled over with enthusiasm over new ex- 

219 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

periences. He never became surfeited with 
travel, was never blase, his pleasure was never 
commonplace. Everywhere in God's world 
were "wonders," and every fresh vision of 
beauty was marvelous in his eyes. In 1856 he 
and Tom Hughes decided to make an excursion 
into Wales, Kingsley's invitation being in 
verse, beginning, — 

"Come away with me, Tom, 

Term and talk is done; 
My poor lads are reaping, 

Busy every one. 
Curates mind the parish, 

Sweepers mind the court, 
We'll away to Snowdon 

For our ten days' sport," 

and containing the following rarely beautiful 
lines, known and loved by everyone who has 
any knowledge whatever of Kingsley: 

"Do the work that's nearest, 

Though it's dull at whiles, 
Helping, when we meet them, 

Lame dogs over stiles ; 
See in every hedgerow 

Marks of angel's feet, 
Epics in each pebble 

Underneath our feet." 

And there in Wales he did find glory and song 
as everywhere. "A glorious day, Snowdonia 
magnificent"; "The glory was what I never 

220 



EVERSLEY 

saw before, all those grand mountains, 'silver- 
veined with rills'; cataracts of snow-white 
cotton threads, if you will, zigzagging down 
every rock face — sometimes a thousand feet — 
and the whole air alive with the roar of waters"; 
"I have had, as far as scenery is concerned, 
the finest day I ever had"; — his letters to his 
wife at this time are filled with such exuberant 
sentences as these. In 1862 he went with Mrs. 
Kingsley and his eldest son to Scotland for a 
month's holiday, and as always he made largest 
demands upon his vocabulary to express his sense 
of joy. "The loveliest spot I ever saw," he 
tells his mother. "We had the grandest drive 
yesterday through Glencove, from Loch Lo- 
mond at Tarby to Inverary around the head 
of Loch Fyne." From the south of France he 
writes: "I never saw a finer sea," "flowers 
wonderful," "the Spanish mountains are covered 
with snow, and look magnificent," "a new and 
most beautiful and curious zoophite, ditto sea- 
weed," "there are the most lovely sweet-smell- 
ing purple pinks on the rocks here, and the 
woods are full of asphodel, great lilies, four feet 
high, with white and purple flowers," "a place, 
which for beauty, beats everything I ever saw"; 
"Three days in the Pyrenees J What I have seen 
I cannot tell you. Things unspeakable and 

221 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

full of glory"; "It is all like a pleasant dream. 
If I had but you and Rose to show it to"; 
"Such a day I never had in my life of beauty 
and wonder . . . and yet there is one thing 
more glorious and precious than the whole 
material universe — and that is a woman's love." 
And this explains better than anything which 
might be said why the world was so beautiful 
to Kingsley, why every new thing was more 
wonderful than any previously seen, why every 
new day was better and holier than any which 
had gone before, why life to him was "from 
glory to glory," why he loved Eversley and its 
simple folks, why he challenged the world in 
behalf of the poor and oppressed everywhere, 
why he said his say, when he knew he courted 
thereby personal loss, contumely, distrust, and 
a whole train of evils, undeserved and painful 
to his sensitive nature. The world to him was 
love. 

And Kingsley loved men with a veritable 
passion. He was a brother of all men. Every 
soul in peril or distress was his care ; every slave 
was his concern; every man oppressed by sin or 
society was his charge. "I will never believe," 
he cries almost impatiently, "that a man has a 
real love for the good and the beautiful except 
he attacks the evil and the disgusting the 

222 



EVERSLEY 

moment he sees it. It is very easy for us to 
turn our eyes away from ugly sights and so con- 
sider ourselves refined. The refined man to me 
is he who cannot rest in peace with a coal mine, 
or a factory, or a Dorsetshire peasant's house 
near him in the state in which they are." His 
feelings for the poor are seen in the pages of 
"Yeast." His first curate has told of Kings- 
ley's respect for the poor. He said he could 
think of no other word to characterize his at- 
titude. "It was not simply that he cared for 
them exceedingly, was kind, feeling, sympa- 
thetic, and would take any amount of trouble 
for them, that those whom he employed be- 
came simply devoted to him. It was far more 
than this. There was in him a delicate, deep 
respect for the poor — a positive looking up to 
them, for His dear sake who 'became poor'; 
for the good which he saw in them, for the still 
greater good which he hoped to see and strove 
that he might see in them." 

In a striking passage in one of the papers which 
Kingsley wrote for "Politics of the People," 
the subject of the paper being "The British 
Museum," which he called a "true, equalizing 
place in the deepest and most spiritual sense," 
he says: "I never felt this more strongly than 
some six months ago, as I was looking in at the 

223 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

windows of a splendid curiosity shop in Oxford 
Street, at a case of humming-birds. I was 
gloating over the beauty of these feathered 
jewels, and then wondering what was the 
meaning, what was the use of it all. . . . Next 
me stood a huge, brawny coalheaver, in his 
shovel-hat and white stocks and highlows, 
gazing at the humming-birds as earnestly as 
myself. As I turned he turned, and I saw a 
bright, manly face, with a broad, soot-grimed 
forehead, from under which a pair of keen flash- 
ing eyes gleamed wondering, smiling sympathy 
into mine. In that moment we felt ourselves 
to be friends. ... I never felt more thoroughly 
than at that minute (though, thank God, I had 
often felt it before) that all men were brothers; 
that fraternity and equality were not mere 
political doctrines, but blessed, God-ordained 
facts; that the party walls of rank and fashion 
and money were but a paper prison of our own 
making, which we might break through any 
moment by a single hearty and kindly feeling; 
that the one Spirit of God was given without 
respect of persons; that the beautiful things 
were beautiful alike to the coalheaver and the 
parson; and that before the wondrous works of 
God, and of God-inspired genius, the rich and 
the poor might meet together, and feel that 

224 



EVERSLEY 

whatever the coat or the creed may be, 'A 
man's a man for a' that,' and one Lord the 
maker of them all." 

It was his love for mankind which made 
Kingsley the chivalric preacher which he was 
to his generation. One who heard him in 
Chester Cathedral said of him that when he 
entered the pulpit, somehow from the simple 
carriage of himself, from every restrained and 
slightest gesture, from every stronger or shyer 
cadence, from the words which he said and the 
the earnest, self-abandoning, strong, joyful way 
in which he said them, there came upon you the 
impression that here was a man who in all best 
senses was a true knight-errant, a man who 
had yielded to God and duty not a few of his 
abilities but his whole manhood, and who had 
an utter personal rejoicing both in the con- 
secration itself and in all sides of that ministry 
which for him the consecration meant. 

The quietest, the gentlest of men in his home, 
Kingsley was a militant parson all his life. He 
was what Whittier called Bunyan, the "fight- 
ing Great-Heart." He had the soldier spirit 
as well as soldier blood. At one time he thought 
of choosing the army as a profession. Singu- 
larly tender and affectionate in his friend- 
ships, he was a kind of "northeaster" in his at- 

225 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

titude toward the world. He "lived in a storm 
and thought in a storm," like Elijah. He hated 
sham and affectation. "Don't cant, Eliza- 
beth," he said to a housemaid, when he was but 
six years old. Thus it was all through his life. 
In particular he loathed "the dapper young-lady 
preachers," whose chief business seemed to be 
to assist at garden parties. Kingsley was a 
fighter, a kind of spiritual frontiersman. When 
he was dying, he was heard to murmur, "No 
more fighting, no more fighting." It was said 
of him that when once fairly let loose upon his 
prey, "all the Red Indian within him came to 
the surface, and he wielded his tomahawk with 
an unbaptized heartiness." When one knows 
the England of Kingsley 's day, this will not 
surprise him. There are times when only a 
belligerent, gladiatorial sort of a preacher will 
dominate the situation. Slavery made the 
Quaker poet Whittier a high priest of violence 
and war. The oppression of the poor in Eng- 
land drove Kingsley to passionate vehemence 
and tempestuous aggression. When he cried 
"Repent" it was with rugged eloquence, like 
that of John the Baptist. There was no mouth- 
ing of words, he would be understood; no 
shamefacedness of manner, why should he 
apologize? no concealment of the sword of 

226 




CHESTER CATHEDRAL 




WESTMINSTER ABBEY 



EVERSLEY 

retribution, the wicked and the oppressor must 
be warned of their fate ! He might be forbidden 
to preach again in London, as he was, though 
the inhibition was afterward withdrawn, but 
he would cry aloud and spare not ! One reason 
he was not in sympathy with the Oxford group, 
Newman, Pusey, Keble, and others — his con- 
troversy with Newman was particularly unfor- 
tunate — he thought them lacking in virility. 
He was a priest, he loved the church as did 
they, but with such appalling conditions as 
those by which the church and society were con- 
fronted at that time, there was an urgent need, 
not for introspection, meditation, the study of 
primitive church and all that sort of thing, but 
for quick, wise action, and Kingsley was es- 
sentially a man of action. 

In 1 848 there were political events which shook 
all Europe. Barricades were put up in the 
streets of Milan, Paris, and Berlin. Every throne 
in Europe was tottering. There had been ten 
years of agitation in England, the demand for 
the Charter having been formulated in 1838. 
The forces of revolt threatened to overthrow 
all authority. It did not seem to Kingsley as 
if this were exactly the time to revise the Prayer 
Book; he preferred to search the Book of Amos 
for guidance in the stern work at hand, for it 

227 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

began to look as if London would witness 
scenes of violence like other European cities. 
A monster petition, "escorted by a hundred 
thousand determined men from Kensington to 
Westminster," was to be presented, and Kings- 
ley hurried from his country parish to London 
to see if something could not be done to avert 
bloodshed. The dear, brave country preacher 
was but twenty-nine years of age at the time. 
Eversley was his parish, but the starving poor 
of England were his concern. No man has 
other limitations upon his activities than his 
own heart. The field is the world, said Jesus. 
There is no East, no West, no home field, no 
foreign field, no country parish, no city parish 
to that minister who, like his Master, carries 
the world on his heart. Wherever stationed, 
he is at the center: 

"Where our duty's task is wrought 
In unison with God's great thought, 
The near and future blend in one." 

The moment Kingsley reached London, he 
found himself with Maurice in the midst of 
the fray, and Kingsley, as if inspired, wrote 
his famous placard address to the Workingmen 
of England, beginning: "You say that you are 
wronged. Many of you are wronged; and 
many besides yourselves know it. Almost all 

228 



EVERSLEY 

men who have heads and hearts know it — above 
all the working clergy know it. They go into 
your houses; they see the shameful filth and 
darkness in which you are forced to live crowded 
together; they see your children growing up 
in ignorance and temptation, for want of fit 
education; they see intelligent and well-read 
men among you, shut out from a ' Freeman's 
just right of voting and they see, too, the noble 
patience and self-control with which you have 
as yet borne these evils. They see it, and God 
sees it. . . ." This address, in every line of 
which glowed the love, the faith, the hope of 
this mighty friend of the poor and downtrodden, 
and which, signed "A Working Parson," was 
posted on shop doors, on trees and public 
buildings, undoubtedly helped more than any 
other one thing to prevent unbridled license 
and disastrous riot in England. 

Kingsley's interest in the poor of his land did 
not end with a single effort in their behalf. His 
pen, which was his sword of battle, was always 
at their service. "I would shed the last drop of 
my lifeblood for the social and political eman- 
cipation of England, as God is my witness," 
he passionately cried. Abuse, calumny, oblo- 
quy were heaped upon him, but his course was 
fixed. "My path is clear," he writes, "and I 

229 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

will follow it. God has made the Word of the 
Lord like fire in my bones, giving me no peace 
until I have spoken out." And he did keep to 
his course. He wrote tracts, such as "Cheap 
Clothes and Nasty," which is a Christian 
prophet's denunciation of the sweating system. 
He wrote books like "Yeast," "with his heart's 
blood," and "Alton Locke" in which Carlyle 
found "everywhere a certain wild impetuosity, 
which holds the reader fast as by a spell," 
both books conceived and made in the interest 
of the poor; and "The Saint's Tragedy," which 
while it contains here and there some exquisite 
lines like these: 

' ' Oh ! that we two were Maying 

Down the stream of the soft spring breeze; 
Like children with violets playing 
In the shade of the whispering trees. 

Oh! that we two sat dreaming 

On the sward of some sheep-trimm'd down, 
Watching the white mist steaming 

Over river and mead and town. 

Oh! that we two lay sleeping 

In our nest in the churchyard sod, 

With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast, 
And our souls at home with God, 

is, like the other books named, controversial. 
He contributed to "Politics for the People," 
and the "Christian Socialist," the latter a paper 

230 



EVERSLEY 

whose purpose was clearly indicated by its 
title, and which after a brief and stormy career 
had for financial reasons to be discontinued. 
"It perished with the flag flying defiant still, 
and no repentance or repudiation of the cause 
which it had made its own." But the fighting 
parson, the friend of the weak, the starving, 
the sick, the wronged, kept on fighting. 

All Kingsley's parish labors had their source 
in this same passion for ailing, decrepit, bat- 
tered men and women, whose lives were narrow, 
impoverished, and without hope. Like Words- 
worth's ideal country parson, 

"Man he loved 
As man; and, to the mean and the obscure 
And all the homely in their homely works, 
Transferr'd a courtesy which had no air 
Of condescension." 

He was the intimate friend of every one in the 
parish. They familiarly called him, because 
they loved him, "Uncle," nor did he resent 
it. It has been told more than once how he be- 
came all things to all in his parish, how with 
the farmer he discussed the rotation of crops, 
and with the laborer the science of hedging and 
ditching, and Kingsley had never taken a course 
in an Agricultural College! He was at perfect 
ease when talking with a woman at the wash- 

231 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

tub, and so was she. Children loved him, and 
ran after him, tugging, unafraid, at his coat. 
Daily he visited from house to house. What 
a beautiful picture, this of England's most 
popular preacher in his generation, the cultured, 
scholarly, book-loving Kingsley going from 
door to door in a rural community, just from 
sheer love of it ! Once when he had planned to 
go to Manchester to see an exhibition of pic- 
tures — he was an artist as well as an author — 
he gave up the trip, because he could not leave 
a poor, sick woman who was counting on his 
daily visits. "Nothing was ever more real than 
Kingsley 's parish visiting," was the comment of 
a friend who went with him one afternoon on 
a round of calls, and who relates how, when 
they had stopped at a house where was one 
"sick of a fever," and found the atmosphere of 
the stuffy little bedroom horrible, and without 
possibilities of ventilation, Kingsley, to the 
great astonishment of the members of the house- 
hold, proceeded to bore with an auger which he 
had brought with him, several holes near the 
bed, that the patient might have air. He is 
up at five in the morning to see a dying man, 
and calls three times during the day. "I went," 
he writes, "to see E. H., and read and prayed 
with her. How one gets to love consumptive 

232 



EVERSLEY 

patients!" Nothing was allowed to interfere 
with his pastoral work. He wrote books, like 
"Hypatia," that novel of the crumbling Roman 
Empire, "Hereward the Wake," with its un- 
approached description of the "Fens," "West- 
ward Ho!" another historical novel, the best 
known and most popular English romance 
of the sixteenth century, "Two Years Ago," 
the moral of which is physical cleanliness, 
and "The Waterbabies," which was written for 
his baby boy, a book filled with "Tomfooleries," 
as the author says, but having a serious purpose, 
viz., "to make children and grown folks under- 
stand that there is a quite miraculous and 
divine element underlying all physical nature." 
Kingsley loved to write, but he never took 
time for it which belonged to his people. One 
year when his pastoral duties were unusually 
heavy he stole time from sleep, rising at four 
or five in the morning that he might write until 
breakfast. He had to do this, for his parish ac- 
tivities were many. He was in truth what he 
had signed himself in his appeal to the working- 
men of England, "A Working Parson." 

New clubs for the poor, shoe club, coal club, 
maternal society, a loan fund, and lending 
library, were established one after another, and 
an adult evening school was held in the rectory 

2 33 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

all the winter months; a Sunday school, too, 
met there regularly; weekly cottage lectures 
were given in the outlying districts for the 
old and feeble, and a cottage school for infants 
was opened on the common. A singing class 
was started to improve the church music, which, 
like so many organizations, met at the parson- 
age, thus bringing the people under the "hu- 
manizing influences" of the Kingsley home. 
What a center of beneficent influences a coun- 
try parsonage can be! Kingsley lectured or 
taught every night of the week, and held an 
extra Sunday evening service in a cottage a 
mile from the church. He set an example 
of painstaking care in preparing young peo- 
ple for confirmation which the whole English 
Church sought to follow. And in many other 
respects also was he an example. When an 
epidemic of diphtheria broke out in Eversley, 
without thought of himself, or of his family, 
he hastened from cottage to cottage with 
medicines to prevent the progress of the disease. 
When cholera raged in England he went to 
London and there, and in the country as well, 
began a crusade against dirt and unspeakably 
bad sanitary conditions. "We doctors," said 
an eminent London physician to Mrs. Kings- 
ley, "all knew well your noble husband's 

234 




EVERSLEY RECTORY 




EVERSLEY CHURCHYARD 



EVERSLEY 

labors in the cause of public health when it 
was too little thought of by statesmen. He 
led the way." In 1849 there was a fever epi- 
demic in Eversley which gave him much anx- 
iety and incessant work. His parishioners 
became frightened ; it was difficult to get nurses 
for the sick, and Kingsley was with them at all 
hours. After sitting up by the bedside of a 
poor laborer's wife, the mother of a large family, 
that he might himself give the nourishment 
every half hour on which her life depended, 
his health broke down, and he was compelled 
to take a brief rest in Devonshire. That was 
the measure of Charles Kingsley 's pastoral de- 
votion! Like his Master, he spared not him- 
self. How human he was, too, and unprofes- 
sional! Dean Stanley in the funeral discourse 
which he preached in Westminster Abbey the 
Sunday following Kingsley's death in January, 
1875, said: "He was what he was, not by virtue 
of his office, but by virtue of what God had 
made him in himself. He was, we might almost 
say, a layman in the guise or disguise of a 
clergyman — fishing with the fisherman, hunting 
with the huntsman, able to hold his own in 
tent and camp, with courtier or with soldier; 
an example that a genial companion may be 
a Christian gentleman, that a Christian clergy- 

235 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

man need not be a member of a separate caste, 
and a stranger to the common interests of his 
countrymen." Those who attended service in 
the Eversley Church were astonished at the 
absence of professionalism in the conduct of 
worship. When a fire broke out on the heath, 
threatening the fir trees which he loved so 
deeply, although it happened right in the midst 
of a service in the church, he handed over the 
service to his curate and went out to lead the 
fire-fighters. To him that was as religious an 
act as the conduct of public worship. On 
another occasion, in going from the altar to 
the pulpit, he suddenly disappeared and later 
it was learned that his attention had been 
drawn to a hurt butterfly, which had fallen to 
the floor, and was in danger of being trampled 
upon, and lifting it up he had carried it to safety 
in the vestry. There was nothing incongruous 
to him in this, nor was it irreverent, as it might 
have seemed to Keble. Kindness was of larger 
value in his eyes than even decorum in public 
worship. He was a strangely interesting man 
always; gentle as a woman, yet working "with 
a twenty-parson power"; versatile — it was re- 
markable how many things he could do well; 
he had a twentieth-century charity worker's 
horror of almsgiving, and yet found it hard to 

236 



EVERSLEY 

refuse any one; he was brusque, yet Lowell, 
when he was being shown by him around 
Chester Cathedral, thought him thoroughly 
kind and patient; he was regarded as a liberal 
in theology, but few men have held more tena- 
ciously to the Scriptures as the solution for 
all problems than he did; he was ''a strange 
mixture of earnestness and fun, deep reverence 
and rollicking cheerfulness, serious without 
falsity or affectation, bright and brimful with 
high spirits, yet with a real sanctity visible in all 
he does and says, without a shadow of sanc- 
timoniousness, varying his occupations from 
grave to gay without losing his moral equi- 
librium, work and relaxation alternating with 
each other to keep up the intellectual balance." 
As a preacher Kingsley attracted attention 
from the very beginning. It must have been 
in part from the intensity of his utterances 
and in part from the immediateness of his 
message. Bishop Summer thought his sermons 
too colloquial, but Kingsley was always uncon- 
ventional, and it was his unconventionality of 
manner and phrase which helped to gain for 
him a hearing. It was seen, too, that his 
preaching was a present message. His burn- 
ing concern was for the immediate good of men 
as in distinction from their celestial happiness. 

2 37 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

"What is the use," he cried, "of talking to the 
hungry pauper about heaven? 'Sir,' as my 
clerk said to me yesterday, 'there is a weight 
upon their hearts, and they care for no hope 
and no change, for they know they can be no 
worse off than they are.' And so they have no 
spirit to arise and go to their Father." His 
message, therefore, was not ancient philosophy 
or mediaeval theology. It had to do rather with 
what was going on in Eversley and in England 
at that very time, the sufferings, the oppressions, 
the miseries, the sins, the longings of his own 
people, and of his generation. There were 
other characteristics, many of them, a sim- 
plicity which was pleasing alike to rustic and 
prince, a clearness like "the clearness of a 
narrow trout-stream such as his soul loved," 
genuineness, large-heartedness like the sweep 
of the sea at Clovelly, definiteness, trans- 
parent truthfulness, terrible earnestness, emo- 
tional force, reminding one at times of Savon- 
arola, an utter absence of artificiality, an illus- 
trative picturesqueness. These and other quali- 
ties made him acceptable both as a court and 
as a village preacher. "At times eloquent be- 
yond any man I ever heard" was the tribute an 
old student paid to his pulpit power. Kings- 
ley's curate said of it that while it was befitting 

238 



EVERSLEY 

his genius that he should be heard in Ches- 
ter Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, where 
crowds could listen to his peerless eloquence, 
in his judgment he was never heard to better 
advantage than in his own village pulpit. "I 
have sometimes been so moved by what he 
there said," he adds, "that I could scarcely 
restrain myself from calling out, as he poured 
forth words now exquisitely sad and tender, 
and now grand and heroic, with an insight into 
character and knowledge of the world, and a 
sustained eloquence, which, each in its own way, 
was matchless." 

Distinction, fame, came to the Eversley 
parish-minister. Kingsley was not "lost in the 
country." It was not long before a path 
was worn to his door. Men and women of 
note, Maurice, Dean Stanley, Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, Tennyson, Queen Emma of the Sand- 
wich Islands, Tom Hughes, Matthew Arnold, 
and a multitude of others found their way 
to the Eversley rectory. From all over the 
world, from Africa, India, China, America, 
letters came to him, some of them addressed 
merely "Charles Kingsley, England." A coun- 
try parish had become a world center. From 
everywhere people wrote to him concerning 
their difficulties. Strangers asked advice on 

239 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

delicate questions of conscience and conduct. 
"The skeptic dared tell him of his doubts; 
the profligate of his fall." The timid seeker 
after truth turned to him to share in his quiet 
confidence, the hungry and cold to feel the 
warmth of his honest heart. The Oxford 
movement was at high tide, and knowing his 
attitude toward it, mothers wrote for help in 
rescuing their daughters from the influence of 
Anglican confessors; ministers sought his assist- 
ance in saving their people from following the 
course of Newman and others; "while women 
hovering between the Church of England and 
Rome, between the 'sanctity' of a nunnery 
and the monotonous duties of a family life, 
laid their difficulties before the author of the 
'Saint's Tragedy'; and he who shrank on 
principle from the office of father-confessor 
had the work thrust upon him by numbers 
whom he never met face to face in this world." 
Moreover the Eversley Church was now crowded. 
Soldiers came over from the camp at Alder- 
shot. Men and women came out from London. 
Visitors to England from the colonies, and 
other lands, journeyed to Eversley to hear 
Kingsley preach. One Sunday, when twelve 
carriages were standing near the church, the 
simple-hearted sexton was heard to say that 

240 



EVERSLEY 

he could not understand why there was "such 
flitting to and fro to our church on Sundays." 
Kingsley did not like this notoriety. "I can- 
not bear having my place turned into a fair 
on Sundays, and all this talking after church," 
he often said, and that he might avoid meeting 
strangers in the churchyard, which to him 
was always a sacred place, he would escape 
after service through the vestry door into his 
garden. But it mattered not, people con- 
tinued to invade the country parish in order 
that they might see and hear the man who 
had put it on the map of the world. 

In 1859 ne preached for the first time before 
Queen Victoria, at Buckingham Palace, and 
shortly after was made one of her chaplains, 
and thereupon he took his turn as preacher 
in the royal chapels of Whitehall and Saint 
James, and once every year he officiated in 
the Queen's private chapel at Windsor. His 
relations with the royal family were ever there- 
after cordial, and he received many marks of 
royal favor. In 1861 he began to give private 
lectures to the then Prince of Wales, later 
Edward VII. He was offered the regius pro- 
fessorship of modern history at Cambridge, 
which he accepted, continuing, of course, his 
connection with Eversley, and became one of 

241 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

the most popular of lecturers in that uni- 
versity. Max Miiller says that Kingsley's lec- 
tures were more largely attended than any in 
Cambridge. In 1869 Mr. Gladstone asked him 
to accept the canonry of Chester Cathedral, 
and a dozen years later wrote him: "I have 
to propose to you, with the sanction of her 
Majesty, that in lieu of your canonry at Chester, 
you should accept the vacant stall in West- 
minster Abbey. I am sorry to injure the 
people of Chester; but I must sincerely hope 
that your voice will be heard within the Abbey, 
and in your own right," and it was. All 
these honors were very grateful to Kingsley, 
who had had through the years more than 
his share of abuse and reproach, but nothing 
could draw him away from Eversley. He 
would accept no ecclesiastical preferment which 
would compel him to leave his country parish. 
"Even a deanery I should shrink from," he 
wrote to a friend who had congratulated him 
on some rumored promotion; "the home to 
which I was ordained, where I came when I 
was married, I intend shall be my last home: 
for go where I will in this hardworking world, 
I shall take care to get my last sleep in Eversley 
churchyard." There were years when he did 
not even go to London often, although it was 

242 




CHARLES KINGSLEY S GRAVE 



EVERSLEY 

less than forty miles distant, his love of the 
country and of his home was so great. "I 
love home and green fields more and more, 
and never lust either after Babylon or the 
Continent." Why should he? His heart was 
in Eversley, and he was, and will be for all 
time, the prophet of 

"Do the work that's nearest, 
Tho' it's dull at whiles, 
Helping, when we meet them, 
Lame dogs over stiles." 

Life in that quiet parish was never unevent- 
ful. He never found it dull. Moreover, he 
was able to watch the movements of society 
and follow the current of events, with finer 
discernment and a saner judgment at a distance 
than nearer at hand. 

And not only was he a blessing to Eversley, 
but Eversley was a blessing to him. The 
awayness, the calm, the leisure for writing 
and studying, the opportunity for pastoral 
clinics, the blue sky under which to fight and 
pray, all these gave him opportunities, as 
they are offered to every man situated as Charles 
Kingsley was, for self-improvement and soul 
culture, which a few men covet, and which 
all might well desire. Writing on his thirty- 
eighth birthday, June 12th, 1857, to Tom 

243 



COUNTRY PARISHES 

Hughes, Kingsley said: "God has been very- 
good to me, and I cannot help feeding a hope 
that I may fight a good fight yet before I die, 
and get something done. I've done little 
enough yet. The best work ever I've done 
has been my plain parish work, and that I've 
done miserably ill." Others thought better of 
his work, though, than he did. Maurice, whom 
Kingsley called the most beautiful human soul 
God in his mercy had allowed him to meet, 
was heard to say that Charles Kingsley was 
the best son, the best father, the best husband, 
the best parish priest he had ever known. 

When he died he might have been buried 
in Westminster Abbey, where sleep many of 
England's noblest and mightiest, but, like his 
Master, "having loved his own he loved them 
unto the end," and as he desired he was buried 
in the Eversley churchyard, and on the white 
marble cross, placed by his wife above his 
grave, are carved, under a spray of his favorite 
passion flower, the words of his choice, which 
better than any others epitomize the story 
of his life: 

Amavimus, Amamus, Amabimus. 



244 



46- 79 



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